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, while the third in the Laidlaw trilogy, Strange Loyalties, won the Glasgow Herald's People's Prize. He died in December 2015. The Papers of Tony Veitch is the second book in the Laidlaw Trilogy.
Also by William McIlvanney
The Laidlaw Investigations Laidlaw Strange Loyalties
Other novels The Big Man Remedy is None A Gift from Nessus Docherty The Kiln Weekend
The paperback edition published in Great Britain, the USA and Canada in 2020 by Black Thorn, an imprint of Canongate Books Ltd,
14 High Street, Edinburgh EH1 1TE
Distributed in the USA by Publishers Group West and in Canada
by Publishers Group Canada
Published in Great Britain in 1983 by Hodder and Stoughton Ltd
This digital edition first published in 2013 by Canongate Books
Copyright © William McIlvanney, 1983
Extract from Strange Loyalties copyright © William McIlvanney, 1991
The right of William McIlvanney to be identified as the
author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance
with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Except where actual historical events and characters are being described for the storyline of this novel, all situations in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead,business establishments, events or locales is purely coincidental.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available on request from the British Library
ISBN 978 1 83885 109 5
eISBN 978 0 85786 998 2
For Hilda, who knows why
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