Strange Loyalties (38 page)

According to Ian Rankin, you were supportive of all your literary heirs in that you gave Scottish crime writers their own mongrel tradition. How did that happen?

I had just written
Docherty
, and although I found all the oral research fascinating, I had contemporary starvation, so I wanted to connect with the present again. This is going to sound terrible, but I heard a voice. It sounds like Joan of Arc, eh? So the first clues I had to Laidlaw were things he was saying. He was quite an abrasive man and I knew I wanted to write about him. As a convert who came to Glasgow from Kilmarnock I always loved the place, so I thought I'd write about contemporary Glasgow from the point of view of somebody who would have to go to the bad places. I didn't want it to be some Cook's tour of the city, so I made him a cop. I wrote a first draft of about 40.000 words, and when my agent told me it was a runner I went back to work on that sketch. It was a strange experience. Some of it I loved, but for a long time I didn't know where it was going.

As for the effect
Laidlaw
has had, I wasn't aware of that until people like Val McDermid said to me: “You started it all.” Did I? I've been quite moved that folk regard me as a forerunner of Tartan Noir. In my old age, it's like getting a pension of esteem you didn't know you were going to get. Even the main man, Ian Rankin, wrote me a letter when he was living in France, saying something like: “It was you that made me realise these books can be something worthwhile, so I want to dedicate my second book to you.” I lost the bloody letter. I met him years later and apologised, but I felt bad. I could have got a book dedicated to me, and I blew it because I'm so disorganised.

Is there any chance of you writing a fourth Laidlaw?

I don't know. Sean Connery phoned me once and said: “I've got a window for a film. Do you have any ideas?” So I wrote this thing called
Streets
, a film script of about 80 to 100 pages, and Laidlaw comes into it tangentially. I thought it was quite a good idea, but I'm not telling you what it was in case anybody steals it. Connery shot me with a silver bullet. He said: “My secretary really likes it, but I think it's more a book than a film.” He's
probably right, so I left it at that. Anyway, there's that idea and there's another one for a final Laidlaw, but I don't know. The way I write is so disorganised. It's like the laboratory of some Baron Frankenstein, with inert projects lying all over the room, waiting for the lightning flash that will galvanise them into life.

When we were trying to make a film of
Laidlaw
, we were all sitting in this room, just a wee bit short of the money, and this nice woman said: “Tell you what, let's just keep the money we have and get Willie to play Laidlaw, instead of trying to hire Connery or some other actor.” I thought: “What a terrific idea!” Then everybody in the room burst out laughing, and I thought: “Well, maybe not.” I've always thought that was my chance of fame gone. Too late now, because a tough Glasgow detective with a Zimmer doesn't quite hack it. To get back to your question, I'm always haunted by the ghosts of what I have not done, and Laidlaw is one of those ghosts. If there's anything coming, it'll be the sunset for Laidlaw.

When Laidlaw is asked why darkness fascinates him in
Strange Loyalties
, he answers: “Maybe because I see it almost everywhere, and a lot of people trying to ignore it.” Do you share his night vision or why did you switch to his narrative vantage point?

It's very difficult to answer that honestly, Len. I'm not entirely sure why I made it first person. In my awareness, Laidlaw had developed so much as a character that he could speak for himself, and the one thing I hate doing is boring myself while I'm writing – it's bad enough to bore the reader – so I thought: “I don't want to write about him in the third person again, and the first person might liberate Laidlaw.”

When
Laidlaw
came out, a few journalists complained he's too bright to be a policeman, but I know a lot of bright cops, one of whom was head of the serious crimes squad and he'd been writing poetry all his life. To make it feasible for Laidlaw to read Unamuno,
I just let him speak for himself, so in the end it really liberated
me
. For me,
Strange Loyalties
is Laidlaw most fully realised, and if there were another one I think it would be first person again.

In the same novel,
Strange Loyalties
, you mention a pub, ‘The Getaway'. Were you aware enough of Jim Thompson to want to get away from conventional crime fiction?

Not much, really. I hadn't read much other crime fiction and most of what I had read I was dubious about. Agatha Christie? Even Raymond Chandler, whom I love, made me think: “Wait a minute. This detective's head is made of ferro-concrete.” When my detective gets battered, he won't just walk on. Also, in a ‘whodunnit' the question ‘Who did it?' takes over everything and buries a lot of valuable stuff in its pursuit, so I made it a ‘whydunnit'. In the beginning of
Laidlaw
you know who did it, so the questions you ask are: “Why did he do it?” And: “What's going to happen to him?”

So, if I'm right about the gestation of
Laidlaw
, I would say I was aware enough of crime fiction to want to do something different from what I'd seen. It was a new area which fascinated me and which I thought was underdeveloped. I'm not saying that I could grandly develop it, but I could at least try to suggest that there's more here. It seemed to me that it usually fought as a flyweight and it could fight at least as a middleweight.

Were you worried there might not be more here for much longer if you wrote a Laidlaw a year or how do you explain your ‘arid periods'?

They were arid in terms of book production, but I don't think that's what writing is about. Writing is about writing. The book production is very much a secondary issue, so when the publisher said to me: “Do one a year.” I thought: “Are you kidding? That's like a factory.” I'm not saying that good writers don't do that, but
I
didn't want to do that. I was trying to develop and enlarge myself in those intervening years, but it's also fair to say that I
can be lazy, and to me the hassle of a book is quite severe. It takes a lot out of me, and whenever I write a book I rediscover my lack of confidence. For me, every book I've written has been a bit of a trauma where I thought: “This is maybe bad. Who's going to want to read this?” I've never lost that.

Alan Sharp once wrote an essay about Scottish football. When Billy Bremner failed to score and take us to the next level, he was down on his knees with his face buried in his hands, and Alan said: “I know that moment. It's a Scottish moment – the moment you're found out.” I suppose I've always had a bit of that: “This time,
this
time they're going to see the emperor is bollock naked here.” Besides, although I'm not saying it's feasible or that I came remotely close to doing it, I always wanted to believe in the next book in advance and know: “Something new is here, some progress has been made.”

Is the joy of writing its autonomy?

Yes, but it's not autonomy in a self-confident sense; it's autonomy in a dangerous sense. You realise that you could fall on your arse every time you do it, and it's that risk that is exciting – the defiance of the risk. Life is a haphazard means of precipitating fiction for me. I come to a place and think I'd like to write something that accommodates these things. I try to create something of interest, and if I'm lucky I create moments of truth, but it's always a risk.

Is it fair to say that you and your characters are preoccupied with the shifting roles in their lives – who am I here?

I suppose so. I've spent my whole life intermittently asking myself that. I think if you don't do that you miss half the truth. If you don't realise you're playing multiple roles and ask yourself which one is truly you, you miss the game. In a lot of ways life is a performance. That doesn't mean you're pretending, but that
you're adopting a stance more confident than the circumstances allow, and it loses a frisson if you don't admit you're pirouetting on thin ice. Some game to play this – it's great fun and I love it. Sometimes, the ice will go, but you live with that. You constantly re-examine yourself, and you're lucky if you give yourself a pass mark, but you go on. There's the constant asking of “who am I here?”

Is literature about faith to you and your characters whose high hopes end in high tragedy?

Absolutely. To me, Shakespeare is a kind of locum God. In the absence of a God I can believe in, he explains human nature to me more than anybody else I've ever read. I don't think life's about success; it's about the honour of the endeavour. I'm old-fashioned enough to believe in honour. You live towards others as honestly as you can, and if you live honourably, you go to your grave on your own terms. To me, part of the greatness of people is taking on the bad stuff and not visiting it upon anybody else. Wilfully inflicting unnecessary pain on others pygmifies the species, although I must have done my share of that. Somebody like Laidlaw is a massively imperfect man, and he might visit it on folk that he thinks are cheating at the game, but he doesn't invade decent people's lives with it. I don't know if he's a tragic figure, but he's a tortured figure. He's trying to be honest in the midst of endless pomposity and dishonesty. He's an awkward man, but I like him, and I agree with him most of the time. If we had the courage of our doubts, not of our convictions, the millennium could be here.

You've described detective work as “a balancing act of subtle mutual respects. You hoped to give small to get back big.” How has that worked out for Laidlaw and yourself?

I've certainly got back big. The man who organises the Glasgow
Book Festival invited me to speak next year because it's been 35 years since
Laidlaw
came out. It was like saying: “Dear Willie, do you realise how old you are?” Not until you mentioned it, no. I had no idea that I would be as lucky as for serious writers of crime fiction to say I was helpful in releasing the genre in Scotland, although I'm not sure they're not being too generous. It's nice of them to think so, but it hasn't made me think I can sit back and rely on it. It matters because it gives you the energy or the chutzpah to go back into that place where you write and where you're on your own, but it doesn't matter once you're back in that padded cell, trying to rediscover the honesty of what you're hoping to say.

When did you first see yourself as a writer?

When I was 17, I went to the headmaster and said: “I'm giving up Greek, Sir.” – “Why?” – “Because it's interfering with my reading.” He said: “Don't you mean you're reading is interfering with your Greek?” – “No, Sir. If I'm not going to be a writer, I'm not going to be anything.” Another time, I was sitting in a library at Glasgow University, revising for a history exam with a friend, Frank Donnelly, when a wee latticed window suddenly blew open. It was a weird feeling, so I took out my notebook and wrote it down. When I looked up, Frank was staring at me and said: “I think you should watch that, Willie. They could take you away for that.” It was a compulsion I had then, and it's developed, but I don't mind it because it was part of my almost lifelong compulsion to try to be a writer.

How do you write?

I write with a pen. If it doesn't go through my system and straight onto the page I don't quite believe it, so everything I've written in my life, I've written in longhand. My favourite pen is a fineliner, and I've never typed in my life, never used a computer. I'm not proud of that, mind. It's just what I do.

Which aspects of writing do you think can be taught?

All you can do is encourage writing. I don't think you can teach writing. I can understand why people teach plot, though I don't know how good I would be at that. I tend to work it out as I go along, but it's valid for people who want to write to have writers teach them. I'm just not going to be one of them. It depends on the writer, but I think somebody who really feels a powerful compulsion should watch out about taking too much advice from anybody. You don't want to theorise it to death.

Writing is ultimately an inexplicable compulsion, and there may be valid ways to assist that process, but I wouldn't know what they are, and I tend to believe in the power of writing that doesn't need it, but maybe I'm wrong. When I taught creative writing classes, I didn't tell people how to write. I encouraged them to write and to see that defying my advice was possibly as valuable as following it. Creativity is intelligent passion – passion with a jockey on its back. You must have the force to write, but you should also try to have the intelligence to direct that force. And eventually you have to be your own jockey.

Looking back now, do you know why Laidlaw's marriage failed?

No. I'm not entirely sure. He never told me. It's probably his intensity about his job. He's so aware of the outside that he can't quite focus on the inside. He can't relax in his domesticity. The two coexist in a contradictory way, but I think there are other factors. He gets involved outside his marriage, but I don't know if he's due my flagellation, because he's a troubled man, which I quite like about him. He's so involved in the nature of things you can't always trust him to relate to you directly, which makes him a detective version of a writer, relating his own experience to that of others. At least to that extent, he may be a wee bit like a writer.

Writing compromises normalcy. It makes it more difficult to fit comfortably into society. Writers may be good at kidding on, or maybe it's just that the writers I love are always a bit outside. Could you imagine making Kafka comfortable? Nah. The difficulty is not that you're some amazing genius, but that what you're trying to do is so bizarre, which is to live life and overtake it. It's like disembowelling something and trying to make it live again, which is why serious writing is a troublesome thing to carry. It's a gig my life could have been easier without, and, whether or not it's screwed up my life, it's certainly complicated it. Without being melodramatic, writing is like living a parallel existence. Just as your real life feeds into your fiction, your fiction feeds into your real life, so I don't think writers move through life with the same smoothness as some nonwriters may do. Graham Greene claimed every writer must have a chip of ice in his heart, and he mentioned a painter who once confessed he couldn't help but notice the way the light struck his wife's head as she lay dying. There's a bit of you that records as you experience, and that mild split personality can be a bit troublesome, as you're not just living your life but looking on at it at the same time.