Soay itself soon becomes an abattoir: the Hebrides reimagined by Bosch and Goya. The skin of basking sharks is spined, rasping and parasite-pitted: Maxwell and his fellow butchers wear "armoured gloves", and wield "axes, saws and knives". He spends days at sea hunting, and days on Soay struggling in "mountains of soft cold flesh and entrails". To get at the liver, it is necessary to cut deeply and quickly across the belly, so that an "avalanche of liver and entrails" rushes out. "Once I was not quick enough," writes Maxwell, "and was knocked flat on myback and enveloped by it, struggling free drenched in oil and blood, with a feeling almost of horror." Of that grotesque sentence, it is the word "almost" that is most disturbing.

How far all this is from today's ethically well-intentioned nature writing. How far, too, from the widespread perception of Maxwell as a man who lived in harmony with the wild world. Harpoon is about blood and bone and blades and ledger-books; about how chunks of shark flesh continue to quiver eerily for hours after death, even if the "entire fore-part of the head" has been severed with a hatchet.

Which is what makes it, and pretty much everything Maxwell wrote, so fascinating. His books represent – in their psychodramas and their ultraviolence – the dark side of British place-literature. To read them as hymns to tranquillity is trite. To engage with their tangled understories is mesmerising. Alongside them I would place TH White's The Goshawk and JA Baker's The Peregrine, which reads – in its obsessive tallying of body parts, bloodstains and kill paths – like an ornithological CSI.