William McIlvanney’s first novel, Remedy is None, won the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize and with Docherty he won the Whitbread Award for Fiction. Laidlaw and The Papers of Tony Veitch both gained Silver Daggers from the Crime Writers’ Association. Strange Loyalties, the third in the Detective Laidlaw trilogy, won the Glasgow Herald’s People’s Prize.
Also by William McIlvanney
Fiction
Remedy is None
Gift from Nessus
The Big Man
Walking Wounded
The Kiln
Weekend
The Detective Laidlaw trilogy
Laidlaw
The Papers of Tony Veitch
Strange Loyalties
Poetry
The Longships in Harbour
In Through the Head
These Words: Weddings and After
Non Fiction
Shades of Grey – Glasgow 1956–1987, with Oscar Marzaroli
Surviving the Shipwreck
DOCHERTY
William McIlvanney
Introduction by Hugh McIlvanney
Copyright © William McIIvanney 1975
First published in 1975 by George Allen & Unwin
This digital edition first published in 2013 by Canongate Books. 14 High Street, Edinburgh, EH1 1TE
The moral right of the author has been asserted
All characters in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN: 978 1 78211 179 5
To the memory of my father and for
Mother, Betty, Neil and Hugh - in the
hope that there’s enough to go round.
There was a real High Street. This isn’t it but this is meant in part to be an acknowledgement of the real one. For that reason I want to make it clear that at no point are any of the people in this book identifiable with the actual people who lived there. But I hope there survives in the book some of the spirit with which those people imbued the place.
Contents
Introduction by Hugh McIlvanney
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Introduction
There was a time during my early years on the staff of The Observer in London when the sports department’s office was next to that of the great literary editor Terence Kilmartin, whose distinctions would later include acclaim as a translator of Proust. Terry and our small crew found being neighbours agreeable and mutually interesting, so it was no surprise when he walked through our door on a May morning in 1966. But he made the moment more unusual by handing me two or three sheets of paper