Criminal Outrage

By Paul Grey

LAIDLAW by WILLIAM MclLVANNEY 224 pages. Pantheon. $7.95.

This novel should surprise those who think that the only Scottish murder mystery is Macbeth. Set in contemporary Glasgow, it has not a bonny brae nor a twirling tartan to its name; but it offers an assortment of colorful underworld types who demonstrate that tough talk is not softened when it is spoken with a burr. Laidlaw is also the first police procedural by Scottish Author William McIlvanney, 41, who has written three earlier novels and a book of poems, none published in the U.S. Like the whiskies of his native land, Mcllvanney's debut here comes after appropriate aging.

His novel goes down smoothly and with just the right amount of bite. The identity of the killer is revealed in the opening pages: Tommy Bryson, a young homosexual whose attempt to go straight results in the sex slaying of a Glasgow girl. The question is whether the police can get to him before two rival bands of killers, for reasons of their own, run Bryson to earth.

Although Mcllvanney keeps this question hanging almost to the end, his focus is not on suspense but on a close-knit society's reaction to criminal outrage. Detective-Inspector Jack Laidlaw is assigned to catch the murderer, but he resents the assumption--especially rife among his fellow policemen--that this process is just the same as caging an animal. He argues, instead, that "monstrosity's made by false gentility. You don't get one without the other. No fairies, no monsters. Just people."

Yet Laidlaw is no bleeding heart.

"I hate violence so much," he tells a colleague, "I don't intend to let anybody practise it on me with impunity." When an enemy on the force confesses aloud an urge to "rearrange" Laidlaw's face, Laidlaw replies: "You should fight that. It's called a death-wish." As Mcllvanney pieces him together, Laidlaw emerges as a jumble of contradictions, a sensitive, intelligent soul performing brutal, repetitive work. Indeed, some of Laidlaw's ruminations sound like heavier luggage than a functioning police man ought to carry: "What's murder but a willed absolute, an invented certainty?

An existential failure of nerve."

Lilting Music. Such outbursts of bookishness threaten to tip the novel into a treatise. Fortunately, Mcllvanney always manages to regain his balance by hitting the streets. His evocations of the old city seem etched in ancient stone and rubbed with coal dust. Laidlaw runs his investigation from a fading hotel: "The architecture was Victorian and very dirty. It had been cunningly equipped with curlicues and excrescences, the chief effect of which was to make it an enormous gin for drifting soot and aerial muck. It stood now half-devoured by its catch, weighted with years of Glasgow."

Mcllvanney captures the speech of his Glaswegians with similarly high fidelity. At first glance, the dialect seems designed to try the reader's patience: "If there's no somethin' wrang wi' her the noo, there'll be somethin' wrang wi' her when Ah get ma haunds oan 'er." Gradually, though, the "hoot, mon" appearance of words on the page disappears, replaced by the odd, lilting music of street, sitting room and pub.

Purists may want their crime stories with more matter and less art. But Mcllvanney has created a hero and staked out a terrain that justify his tech niques. Late in the novel, Laidlaw suggests that he will be back. It will take a few more cases for him to join the ranks of Maigret, Martin Beck or Lew Archer, but there is definitely a promising new man on the beat. Paul Grey

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