Abstract
My topic is the urban crime novel and in particular the two crime novels of William McIlvanney, Laidlaw and The Papers of Tony Veitch.1 I want to approach McIlvanney’s writing by way of a discussion of ‘wise guy’ or ‘hard-boiled’ style, and its possible take-up in British writing. But I shall begin by juxtaposing two ways of understanding genre, as a means of demonstrating what is at stake in the following discussion; namely what meanings are generated by, and can be carried by, urban crime writing.
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Notes
William McIlvanney, Laidlaw (1977; London: Coronet, 1979); The Papers of Tony Veitch (1983; London: Coronet, 1984). Subsequent references to these books are given in the text.
Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (London: Methuen, 1981) pp. 140–1.
Stuart Hall, ‘Notes on Deconstructing the “The Popular”’, in People’s History and Socialist Theory, ed. Raphael Samuel (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1981) p. 234. I recognise that ‘genre’ and ‘form’ are not interchangeable, but the differences do not affect the contrast here.
Peter Brooks, Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984). See especially the chapter entitled ‘The Mark of the Beast: Prostitution, Serialisation and Narrative’, pp. 143–70.
Ken Worpole, Dockers and Detectives (London: Verso, 1983) pp. 29–49.
Stephen Knight, Form and Ideology in Crime Fiction (London: Macmillan, 1980) pp. 135–67.
Peter Lovesey, Rough Cider (London: Bodley Head, 1986; Mysterious Press, 1987) p. 84.
Gordon Demarco, October Heat (San Francisco, 1979; London: Pluto Press, 1984) p. 1.
G. D. H. and Margaret Cole, The Death of a Millionaire (London, 1925; Harmondsworth, Middx.: Penguin, 1950).
Raymond Chandler, The High Window, in The Chandler Collection, vol. 2 (London: Picador, 1983) p. 25.
Jonathan Valin, Final Notice (1980; London: Futura, 1987) pp. 113–14.
Ibid., pp. 13–14.
William McIlvanney, ‘Where Greta Garbo Wouldn’t Have Been Alone’, in Shades of Grey: Glasgow 1956–1987, photographs by Oscar Marzaroli, words by William McIlvanney (Edinburgh and Glasgow, 1987) pp. 32–3.
Roland Barthes, S/Z, trans. Richard Miller (London: Jonathan Cape, 1975) p. 20.
Derek Raymond, He Died With His Eyes Open (London: Abacus, 1984).
The details of the second and fourth books in this list are: Hannah Wakefield, The Price You Pay (London: The Women’s Press, 1987); Ernest Larsen, Not a Through Street (1981; London: Pluto Press, 1985).
William McIlvanney, The Big Man (London: Hodder, 1985; Sceptre, 1986).
Jerry Palmer has written well about the anti-bureaucratic nature of the thriller hero in Thrillers: Genesis and Structure of a Popular Genre (London: Edward Arnold, 1976).
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© 1990 Simon Dentith
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Dentith, S. (1990). ‘This Shitty Urban Machine Humanised’: The Urban Crime Novel and the Novels of William McIlvanney. In: Bell, I.A., Daldry, G. (eds) Watching the Detectives. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-10591-5_2
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