He might have despaired when his books fell out of print in the 1990s, but by then William McIlvanney's legacy was already assured. Published in the 1970s and 1980s, his Glasgow-set Laidlaw Trilogy was read by such contemporary crime fiction luminaries as Val McDermid, Chris Brookmyre, Denise Mina, Mark Billingham and Ian Rankin. And when McIlvanney died in 2015, he left behind a half-finished manuscript, which has been completed by Rankin and titled The Dark Remains (Canongate, £19.99).
Set in Glasgow in the early 1970s, the story begins with the discovery of the body of a lawyer who provided legal counsel to the gangster Cam Colvin. An old head on young shoulders, Det Jack Laidlaw is part of the investigating team that needs to get a result before tit-for-tat murders spiral out of control into a gangland war on Glasgow’s mean streets.
Rankin is understandably keen to preserve Laidlaw’s unorthodox appeal, even if that involves a certain amount of lily-gilding – “At least I’m a bastard with a glimmer of self-awareness,” says the Kierkegaard-reading Laidlaw. But if the ultimate goal of The Dark Remains is to send the reader off in search of McIlvanney’s original novels, then Rankins succeeds handsomely.
“The law’s not about justice,” Laidlaw tells his partner Lilley. “It’s a system we’ve put in place because we can’t have justice.” By turns cynical, hardboiled and philosophical, Jack Laidlaw is the quintessential crime fiction protagonist, and Ian Rankin delivers a wholly satisfactory homage.
Vera Kurian's debut, Never Saw Me Coming (Harvill Secker, £14.99), offers an intriguing set-up, as self-confessed psychopath Chloe Sevre takes up a place at John Adams University with the stated aim of tracking down her nemesis, Will Bachman, and killing him. The twist is that Chloe signs up to the school's Multimethod Psychopathy Panel Study, which means there is quite a few potential suspects once Chloe realises that she is being targeted by a serial killer. Joining forces with some of her fellow psychopaths, Chloe sets out to discover who is leaving corpses all over campus, all the while scheming to murder Will Bachman.
Potentially a fascinating exploration of psychopathic pathology from an author with a doctorate in social psychology, Never Saw Me Coming quickly degenerates into something of a psycho-killer caper in which the story grows increasingly confused, and especially for Chloe: “I didn’t know why he was doing it,” she muses at one point, “maybe he was a serial killer fanatic or something, but who cared.”
The discerning reader will likely care a little more about plausible motives than Chloe seems to; the whole point of crime fiction, after all, is to make sense of the messy business of murder.
John Hart's superb The Last Child won the Edgar Award in 2010. The Unwilling (Zaffre, £18.99), his seventh novel, opens in the early 1970s with an absorbing tale of a teenager, Gibby French, who is torn between cherishing the memory of his beloved brother Bobby, who died a hero in Vietnam, and following in the footsteps of Jason, the brother who survived Vietnam only to fall into a black hole of heroin addiction, arms dealing and the everyday brutality of prison life.
Just as we’re settling into a classic account of the battle for a young man’s soul, however, Hart introduces the novel’s villain, X, a vicious serial killer who doesn’t merely run the prison from his basement cell, but “could speak of history and philosophy, of literature and art, the great works of mankind ... then just as quickly recall some far-off murder in detail so exquisite it turned your stomach”.
What follows reads like two very different stories awkwardly jammed together: one an affecting coming-of-age novel against the backdrop of an America at war with itself, the other a wildly improbable and crassly exploitative account of violence perpetrated – especially against women – by a Dante-quoting lunatic.
An award-winning author of four memoirs, former Labour MP Alan Johnson turns to fiction with The Late Train to Gipsy Hill (Wildfire, £16.99), which opens in London in 2015 with the poisoning of Denis Smolikov, a Russian documentary maker who has been "commissioned by CNN to make a film about the suppression of political opposition in Russia".
Enter the unsuspecting Gary Nelson, a mild-mannered accountant who has recently relocated from leafy suburbia to south London, and who craves a little excitement in his life, and preferably in the shape of the beautiful woman who shares his train carriage on his daily commute into the city. Having inveigled Gary into helping her escape from her pursuers, Arina Kaplin tells him that she is a Ukrainian waitress who served at the table where Smolikov was poisoned, and is now being chased by the Metropolitan Police, Russian spies and at least one of the Russian gangs that have claimed London for their latest stomping ground. What’s a mild-mannered accountant to do?
Johnson pulls off a difficult trick: the context, that of a “Londongrad” that has in financial terms become “the world’s laundromat”, is grimly realistic, while Gary and Arina’s headlong flight has the old-fashioned quality of The 39 Steps. The cricket-loving Gary, aka “the Spy Who Came in from Accounts Payable”, is a classic example of the hapless amateur embroiled in chaos.
Fast-paced, whimsical and charmingly genteel, The Late Train to Gipsy Hill is a hugely enjoyable caper.
Celia Walden's Payday (Sphere, £12.99) is a kind of post-#MeToo psychological thriller that begins with the discovery of Jamie Lawrence impaled on a park railing after falling from a height. Jamie, we learn, is a property broker: charismatic and driven, he is an "everyday psychopath" and handsy with it, his predations such as to cause his employer Jill, his fellow broker Nicole and his PA Alex to join forces in "putting a not-so-good man down".
Having established her victim, motives and likely killer(s) at an early stage, Walden then proceeds to muddy the waters by delving into the complicated personal lives of Alex, Jill and Nicole, each of whom is obliged to answer a difficult question: “If a woman says it, if it’s her truth, is it the only truth?” Another question, implied rather than asked, is whether anyone, regardless of how destructive their behaviour, should be earmarked for summary justice.
What makes Payday compulsively readable is the fact that Jamie’s death, although confirmed in the prologue, is never an inevitable consequence of his actions, nor those of the women he has so grievously wronged, but the result of incorrect assumptions, second-guessing and misperceptions.
Fans of Liz Nugent’s Unravelling Oliver will find much to enjoy in a novel that is provocatively complex as it explores the grey areas that lurk between right and wrong.
Declan Burke is an author and journalist. His current novel is The Lammisters (No Alibis Press)
