As we have explored elsewhere, Web 2.0 also includes blogs (Kehoe & Gee 2012) and ‘folksonomies’: sites which allow users to assign single word keywords (‘tags’) to videos, photographs or general web content (Kehoe & Gee 2011). Web 2.0, or the social web, encompasses wiki-based sites which allow users to collaborate on production of texts (Wikipedia being most famous example), and popular social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter. Whereas the first generation of websites were information sources designed to be read passively, second generation websites allow users to interact with online content and participate in its creation. In recent years, there has been a growth in so called ‘Web 2.0’ technologies. This paper aims to provide a survey of major features of tartan noir and illustrate these features in use on the representative examples of McIlvanney’s Glasgow-set Laidlaw, Ian Rankin’s Edinburgh-set Knots & Crosses (1987) and Stuart MacBride’s Aberdeen-set Cold Granite (2005). Other characteristics of tartan noir include a pervasive sense of nostalgia accompanied by the detectives’ preference for old-time, hands-on investigation methods often unusually violent crimes and grittiness in the form of old-fashioned, seedy pubs frequented by the detectives, who typically indulge in rough language, heavy drinking and chain smoking. Besides dealing with the criminal investigation, tartan noir seeks to portray psychologically complex characters: criminals are depicted as erring human beings rather than dismissed as monsters, and detectives are shown as deeply flawed rather than as paragons of virtue. What sets tartan noir apart from other crime fiction subgenres is particularly the centrality of the setting to the story, an underlying dark humour and, perhaps paradoxically, an emphasis on the humanity of criminals and detectives alike. Tartan noir, currently Scotland’s major literary export product, was introduced in 1977 with William McIlvanney’s Laidlaw, a novel that laid down the genre’s conventions, which are observed, with minor modifications, up to the present.

Tartan noir is an established critical label for a specifically Scottish strain of crime writing which has more affinities with American hard-boiled fiction (American noir) and contemporary Scandinavian crime fiction (Nordic noir) rather than with genteel English country house mysteries.

Creating Monsters by Christopher Rankin