The McIlvanney Prize - named after ‘Godfather of Tartan Noir’ William McIlvanney - is presented each year at the Bloody Scotland international crime writing festival.
Dreamed up by writers Lin Anderson and Alex Gray, the festival is held in Stirling over three days of September each year, attracting thousands of readers to events feturing hundreds of authors around the world.
1. 2012: Charles Cumming, A Foreign Country
Ayr-born Charles Cumming was the inaugural winner of the McIlvanney Prize for his first novel featuring disgraced MI6 officer Thomas Kell. "On the vacation of a lifetime in Egypt, an elderly French couple are brutally murdered. Days later, a meticulously-planned kidnapping takes place on the streets of Paris. Amelia Levene, the first female Chief of MI6, has disappeared without a trace, six weeks before she is due to take over as the most influential spy in Europe. It is the gravest crisis MI6 has faced in more than a decade. Desperate not only to find her, but to keep her disappearance a secret, Britain’s top intelligence agents turn to one of their own: disgraced MI6 officer Thomas Kell. Tossed out of the Service only months before, Kell is given one final chance to redeem himself - find Amelia Levene at any cost." | Contributed
2. 2013: Malcolm Mackay, How a Gunman Says Goodbye
The second part of Malcolm Mackay's Glasgow Trilogy was also the second book to win the prize. "How does a gunman retire? Frank MacLeod was the best at what he does. Thoughtful. Efficient. Ruthless. But is he still the best? A new job. A target. But something is about to go horribly wrong. Someone is going to end up dead. Most gunmen say goodbye to the world with a bang. Frank’s still here. He’s lasted longer than he should have ..." | Contributed
3. 2014: Peter May, Entry Island
The hugely-popular bestselling Glasgow author Peter May took the title in 2014 for his standalone novel Entry Island. "When Detective Sime Mackenzie is sent from Montreal to investigate a murder on the remote Entry Island, 850 miles from the Canadian mainland, he leaves behind him a life of sleeplessness and regret. But what had initially seemed an open-and-shut case takes on a disturbing dimension when he meets the prime suspect, the victim's wife, and is convinced that he knows her - even though they have never met. And when his insomnia becomes punctuated by dreams of a distant Scottish past in another century, this murder in the Gulf of St. Lawrence leads him down a path he could never have foreseen, forcing him to face a conflict between his professional duty and his personal destiny." | Contributed
4. 2015: Craig Russell, The Ghosts of Altona
The seventh - and last - of Craig Russell's series of Hamburg-set novels featuring detective Jan Fabel took the trophy in 2015. "As head of the Polizei Hamburg's Murder Commission, Jan Fabel is used to dealing with the dead. But when a routine inquiry turns violent and takes him to the brink of his own death, he emerges a changed man. Fast forward two years, and Fabel's first case at the Murder Commission comes back to haunt him. Monika Krone's body is found at last, fifteen years after she went missing. Monika - ethereally beautiful, intelligent, cruel - was the centre of a group of students obsessed with the gothic. Fabel re-opens the case. What happened that night, when Monika left a party and disappeared into thin air?" | Contributed