‘Good luck with the Edinburgh Laidlaw’ McIlvanney wrote in Rankin’s copy. In 1985, for example, Ian Rankin – just 25 and still with no published book to his name – tentatively approached McIlvanney at the Edinburgh book festival, and told him that he was working on a crime novel ‘that’s a bit like Laidlaw, but set in Edinburgh’. The debt to McIvanney isn’t any smaller at the other end of the M8. To recapture its freshness, try unimagining 27 seasons of Taggart and the entire output of the Glasgow Branch of the Tartan Noir Writers’ Union. It’s this shock of Laidlaw’s newness, back in 1977, that we should keep in mind. But nobody had ever smashed those elements together in so accomplished a synthesis.’ Patricia Highsmith had taken us into the heads of killers Ruth Rendell had explored sexuality Alexander McArthur had exposed Glasgow to the world Raymond Chandler had dressed the darkness in clever words. ‘From its opening chapter,’ she has written, ‘I’d never read a crime novel like this. She bought a copy and had a similar epiphany. This is one of those moment when fiction hovers close to autobiography, because in 1977, when Laidlaw came out, McDermid was a 22-year-old reporter working on the Daily Record. ‘She was intrigued by the quality of the prose, which was an uncommon feature in the detective stories she’d previously read.’ ‘It was set in a working-class Glasgow she recognised immediately,’ she notes.

In Val McDermid’s new novel 1979, set in Glasgow in that year, there’s a moment when her journalist protagonist remembers the first time she read William McIlvanney’s Laidlaw. Years later, Ian Rankin is back to finish what McIlvanney started – two iconic authors bringing to life the criminal world of 1970s Glasgow, and Laidlaw’s relentless quest for truth. It felt almost liturgical, these men hungry for a blessing, receiving at best a nodded acknowledgement of their existence.’ When William McIlvanney, one of the crime writing greats, passed away in 2015, he left a handwritten manuscript of the infamous Laidlaw’s first case. There were greetings, the intoning of ‘Mickey’ and ‘Spanner’. ‘They were passing a knot of middle-aged men, caps fixed tightly to heads, collars up.

Ian rankin noughts and crosses