The great Scottish novelist William McIlvanney once described Glasgow as “The City of the Stare”. It was a place, he said, where you never know when to expect the next assault on your privacy. William, or Willie to all who knew him, died on Saturday after a short illness. Scotland has lost one of its genuine literary greats, and Glasgow, where he lived happily with his partner Siobhan, will miss him terribly.

Willie qualified to teach English and is still fondly regarded at the Ayrshire secondary school where he taught for several years before deciding to write full time. By then, his first novel, Remedy is None, had been published in a taste of the riches to come. His novels Docherty and The Big Man featured damaged, working class, male characters whose essential humanity and generosity could never quite be obscured by their flaws.

He built on these themes in his three great detective novels featuring inspector Jack Laidlaw: Laidlaw, The Papers of Tony Veitch and Strange Loyalties. These three remain Scotland’s finest novels of detective fiction and the term “Tartan Noir”, which is too often deployed to describe this oeuvre, doesn’t begin to do them justice. He published two books of poems, the first of which The Longships in Harbour: Poems is a rich and rewarding companion to his future prose fiction.

I got to know Willie when I recruited him as a columnist for Scotland on Sunday in the late 1990s. The process of prising him away from the Herald newspaper was a long and arduous one which took place over eight successive Monday afternoons in the famous Glasgow bar, Rogano. In those days journalists prided themselves on knowing how to drink much and often with few ill effects, but we really weren’t in the same league as Willie, who managed to secure from me the largest weekly fee the Scotsman Publications had ever paid for a columnist. He was worth every penny.

To know Willie was to know something of the compassion and street wisdom he conferred upon his male characters. He loved the company of punters and was never more than a few days away from a visit to The Georgic Bar, a no-nonsense and low-slung tavern on Glasgow’s south side. Yet he was comfortable too in Edinburgh’s literary circles where you were grateful for his presence if only to let some of the New Town know what a proper writer looked and sounded like.

Alan Taylor, editor of The Scottish Review of Books, paid this tribute to him: “William McIlvanney was the greatest Scottish novelist of his generation. More importantly, he was one of the greatest novelists of his era, irrespective of where he came from. He wrote like he spoke, in the rich, simile-soaked, wise-cracking argot of Glasgow.

“But to label Willie a ‘crime writer’ or ‘the godfather of Tartan Noir’ is to seriously underestimate him. His true peers were not alumni of the American hard-boiled school, such as Chandler and Hammett, but the likes of Gogol and Dostoevsky, Zola and Céline. He wrote about hard times and tough people – so-called “big men” and trauchled women – dealing with the fallout of unemployment, poverty and ignorance.

“Why Willie is not better known outside his own heath has always been a mystery. In any other country that prizes the art of literature he would have been lionised. Ever dapperly dressed and as lean as a runner bean, he carried himself as if he were Clark Gable. One of our last encounters was, inevitably, in a Glasgow bar, where he was to have a photograph taken. While that was happening, the barmaid asked who he was. I told her he was a writer. “Oh,” she said, a mite disappointed, “I thought he was probably a movie star.”

The first minister of Scotland, Nicola Sturgeon, also paid tribute. “I am extremely sad to hear of the death of Willie McIlvanney. His writing had a huge influence on me when I was growing up. Docherty, in my view, is one of the classic novels of our time. Willie came from Ayrshire – as I do – and had taught at my school in the years before I went there, so he was something of a local hero. I will always remember the thrill of eventually getting to meet him some years later.

“Willie’s passion for social justice and for Scotland – warts and all – shone through all of his work. His description of Scotland as a ‘mongrel nation’ powerfully summed up our wonderful diversity as a country. Willie was an iconic figure in Scottish literature and deserves to be remembered as one of our literary greats. His passing is a huge loss to Scotland. My thoughts are very much with his family.”