21 March 2022
‘Glasgow is a magnificent city,' reflects one of the characters in Alasdair Gray's Lanark (1981); ‘Why do we hardly ever notice that?' ‘Because,' another character replies, ‘nobody imagines living here.' Over the past half-century, some of the most vivid attempts to imagine living in Glasgow have been crime novels, from the Laidlaw trilogy of William McIlvanney to the fictions of Frederic Lindsay, Denise Mina, Louise Welsh, Christopher Brookmyre and others. And despite the assertion that ‘nobody imagines living here', those novels take their place in a venerable tradition of writing about Scotland's western metropolis.
