The Dark Remains - William McIlvanney and Ian Rankin

 On the face of it, The Dark Remains is an unexpected treat, an unfinished novel by the pioneer of Tartan Noir completed by the master of the form.  In reality it falls below the average of either.  The story itself has potential: the murder of a front man for one of the local gangs threatens to spark a turf war in 1972, when Glasgow was still dying on its hind quarters.

It is perfectly readable, obviously, but there is a conspicuous lack of darkness, the mordant black humour for which both McIlvanney and Rankin were known in their heyday, even credible violence.  The names of the characters - Carter, Thompson - seem like placeholders for something better.  I didn't figure out who the murderer was, but then I rarely do.  I was neither surprised nor especially interested when it was revealed.  There is an tagged-on episode in which the stirrer-up of the turf war gets his comeuppance.  I had forgotten who he was, which in a large print novel of less than 300 pages read over two consecutive days is not good.

It's trivial footnote to a significant career.  There was a reason McIlvanney left it unfinished.  Rankin can still deliver a good novel but it's all about retirement these days, the older man looking back.  Canongate would have done better to get Stuart Macbride or one of the younger lions to work on Dark Remains (which is also a poor title, having nothing to do with the plot).

The Papers of Tony Veitch - William McIlvanney

This is the second of McIlvanney's Laidlaw Trilogy, held by many to be the spring from which Tartan Noir flowed, though I credit the TV series Taggart equally.

McIlvanney is not a genre writer but an award-winning literary writer who found crime fiction as one way of expressing his preoccupations and interests.  Thus Veitch is not really a crime novel - it really doesn't matter who did what to whom.  It is a study of a once mighty city, brought to its knees by Mrs Thatcher, where the hard man has always been as well-regarded as the provost or the Rangers centre-forward.  Jack Laidlaw is as hard as any of villains he hunts down.  The plot drives the narrative but it is the language that makes it sing. Here are just a few of my favourites:

"A lot of the people he dealt with, Milligan thought, must have been home in bed before their self-congratulation went sour and they realised that Macey had been taking the mickey out of the mickey they thought they were taking out of him.  He was so simple he could have sold life insurance in heaven."

"Put a monkey in a toy uniform, Macey thought, and it will try to pull rank."

"She wis a kind wumman, mamither.  Woulda bought extra cheese if she'd knew there wis a moose in the hoose."

"It was a place so kind it would batter cruelty into the ground."

The original ... and in many ways the best.

Hard Truths is a short ebook of an interview with McIlvanney by the contemporary star of Tartan Noir, Tony Black.  It is actually a book of interviews with crime writers chopped up to flog separately on Kindle - a smart idea.  McIlvanney, still going strong at 77, has just got a new publisher, Canongate, who have republished all his work in smart new editions and as ebooks.

He says of Laidlaw, "A detective story, if you get it right you'll have a plot that's going to make people read on but along the way give them serious observation and a sense of the society the novel is passing through."  And of Tartan Noir, "I don't that it'll be the ultimate expression of Scottish culture, folk will come along and do more but I think it's great that there's an area where the value, the significance of the written word is appreciated."

The good news is that, more than twenty years since he finished the Laidlaw Trilogy, McIlvanney is toying with the notion of a prequel, "before he became quite so aggressive", and a "twilight" post-retirement Laidlaw.  We can but hope.