University of Otago professor tells Craig Sisterson why his first novel is a contemporary thriller

(Sisterson's article was first published in the Weekend Herald on 31 October and is reproduced here with permisson. Special thanks to Linda Herrick, Books Editor NZ Herald).

Looking up at the bronze likeness of poet Robbie Burns, listening to bagpipes wafting on the chill air, Professor Liam McIlvanney (pic above) feels remarkably "at home" considering he's so far away from his Kilmarnock birthplace in Scotland. McIlvanney, who immigrated to Dunedin with his young family this year to take on the Stuart Chair in Scottish Studies at the University of Otago, says he's been experiencing an interesting mix of "the foreign and the familiar" in his new home. "It's quite extraordinary to see all the streets named after Edinburgh streets."

In a way, McIlvanney has come full circle. "I grew up in Ayrshire, the epicentre of Burns country, where Burns is absolutely inescapable ... just part of the air we breathed," he says. After a break from the Scottish poet while studying in Glasgow, he returned to his roots with a Burns-themed doctoral thesis at Oxford on the way to becoming an expert in Scottish literature. Now he's teaching a new generation, in another Burns-mad city, about the man dubbed "Scotland's favourite son". He's also come full circle in another way - penning his first fictional tale after years of producing academic articles and non-fiction books on Scottish and Irish culture and society. When his debut novel, All the Colours of the Town, was published by Faber, McIlvanney joined his famous father William, a former schoolteacher, in the ranks of published novelists. The older McIlvanney is a renowned Scottish writer, who has won a Whitbread Award (now the Costa Book Award) for his literary novels and CWA Daggers for his ground-breaking Laidlaw detective novels. Given his knowledge of 18th century Scottish culture, it's perhaps surprising that McIlvanney's first book is a contemporary thriller, although deeply influenced by historic events. All the Colours of the Town centres on Glasgow political journalist Gerry Conway, who receives a tip-off about the unsavoury past of the Scottish Justice Minister, one of his best sources. Initially unimpressed, Conway is eventually drawn into a journey from Glasgow to Belfast, attempting to uncover a shocking story laced with sectarian violence and dangerous secrets. The book has been well-received, with the Observer calling it "a perfect example of why talented writers ought not shy away from tackling genre novels" and The Independent saying "the prose crackles with the sort of neat descriptions Chandler would have been happy to copyright". The latter compliment particularly pleases McIlvanney, who considers the American creator of the Philip Marlowe novels "the absolute gold standard for hardboiled crime, and quality of prose". Despite (or perhaps because of) the fact he studies and teaches "literature", McIlvanney firmly believes crime writing can have an importance beyond mere page-turning entertainment. He points out the wave of Scottish crime writing, fuelled by the success of Ian Rankin (who, incidentally, credits William McIlvanney's Laidlaw as an important influence) and those who have followed, have played a potent role in Scotland by providing a fertile forum for political and social issues to be explored. "Literary fiction can be sort of detached from contemporary realities," he says. "It's been left to the genre writers to hold a mirror up to contemporary Britain." Furthermore, says McIlvanney, many books that are now considered great literature were the "popular fiction" of their time. "In my courses on Scottish literature I teach Robert Louis Stevenson's Jekyll and Hyde, which is now, of course, a classic but at the time was a shilling shocker'." It took McIlvanney, who is now snatching time to pen the second Gerry Conway thriller between teaching and family commitments, two years to complete All the Colours of the Town. What started as a evocative vignette of the famous Orange Walk in Glasgow, a highly-charged sectarian celebration of William of Orange's victory over King James II in 1690, quickly became a book deal after it was read by an agent. "It was just something which had always stuck in my imagination, that I really wanted to write about ... it was the germ of the novel," says McIlvanney. "Then I created my journalist, and the politician whom he's investigating, and it just developed." Even though we live on the other side of the world, most of us are aware of "the troubles" between Catholics and Protestants in Northern Ireland, but McIlvanney says less is known about sectarianism in Scotland. If McIlvanney's debut is anything to go by, perhaps quality crime writing can pull double-duty as great entertainment, and the modern social novel. c All the Colours of the Town (Faber & Faber, $38.99)