The most successful intervention by an entertainer in civic affairs in Britain may well have been Frankie Vaughan’s initiative in 1968 against gang warfare in Easterhouse, a newly built Glasgow housing estate memorably described by the comedian Billy Connolly as a “desert with windows”.

Government figures released in 2000 indicated that the project did indeed reduce violence in Glasgow, and among the local figures who helped Vaughan — rather than mock him for his efforts — was the novelist Archie Hind, whose landmark novel The Dear Green Place (1966) had been published two years previously.

“Imaginatively, Glasgow exists as a music-hall song and a few bad novels. That’s all we’ve given to the world outside. It’s all we’ve given to ourselves.”

This quote from Lanark (1981), the judgment of Alasdair Gray’s hero Duncan Thaw, was often trundled forth as a judgment on the Glasgow fiction of the 1950s; yet, as Moira Burgess pointed out in her magisterial study Imagine a City (1998), Hind’s novel built upon a fairly energetic (if not invariably high-quality) tradition of Glasgow writing both in books and newspapers.

“It is hardly possible to exaggerate the importance of The Dear Green Place to Glasgow fiction,” said Burgess, and the book came to be seen as a forerunner of the more successful Scottish fiction that was to follow. The novel’s quality was recognised immediately and it won the Guardian Prize for a First Novel in 1966.

Hind’s central character, Mat Craig, was a working-class Glaswegian who wanted to write about his city. His troubles were that he had a living to make (he worked in a slaughterhouse), he was not sure of the worth of what he wanted to do and he had difficulties with the everyday Glaswegian language that he had to use to express himself — “a reductive, cowardly, timid, snivelling language cast out of jeers and violence and diffidence; a language of vulgar keelie scepticism”.

The book ended with Craig being sick on a Clyde ferry, with the words of Glasgow’s motto, with its repeated “nevers”, ringing in his ears: “This is the tree that never grew/ This is the bird that never flew” etc. One of the oddities of contemporary representations of Glaswegian working-class life was that while comedians such as Connolly present that life as raucously defiant and funny, many of the city’s novelists presented the same life as one of seemingly relentless despair and failure. The meaning of the perceived grimness was often debated, but few readers will go to Hind or his successors, such as Jim Kelman, for merry quips about life’s inanities.

What was certain was that Craig’s struggles with language and identity — “Where did the failure of his work come from? . . . Was it in the language he spoke, the gutter patois into which his tongue fell naturally when he was moved by a strong feeling?” — were regarded as marking a defining point in Scottish working-class fiction. Towards the end of the book, Craig was reproached “for not writing. Especially at this time, for there was a new something in the air, changes coming about, a new flowering of working-class literature, a new tone.” Burgess quoted Edwin Morgan as saying that in the 1970s “the ‘gutter patois’ of Archie Hind’s soured hero became both an area of experiment and a badge of pride”.

Hind’s initial success was followed by theatre work and rumours of a much-anticipated second novel, entitled Für Sadie, about a Glasgow woman learning the piano. The continuing non-appearance of Für Sadie inspired this touching comment from Alasdair Gray: “Master Hind . . . whose history of Glasgow initituled The Dear Green Place is sufficient for his fame, and who remaineth (until such time he overflow again), a profound cystern of unexpressed wisdom.”

A longstanding member of the Labour Party in Glasgow, Hind served as chairman of the city’s Shawlands branch at a time — the early 1980s — when factional disputes were tearing the party apart, and he is remembered by a past member, Mike Munro (author of The Patter), as “a wise and tolerant” voice.

He is survived by his wife, Eleanor, and their four children.

Archie Hind, novelist, was born on June 3, 1928. He died of cancer on February 21, 2008, aged 79