LAST week I wrote about the novelist Jane Duncan, real name Elizabeth Jane Cameron, who was born in Renton in West Dunbartonshire in 1910. By coincidence, today I am going to tell the story of a novelist and poet who was also born in what is now an area of Renton in the Vale of Leven. With all due respect to the Reachfar author Duncan, in the history of literature Tobias Smollett is a much more renowned figure, recognised as one of the pioneers of novel writing in the English language. It was in this week in 1721 that Smollett was born. Unless I have missed it online, I see no great plans to mark the bicentenary of the birth of a Scotsman who really is worth celebrating. That is a shame, because Smollett is a fascinating character as well as a writer of note – his face is one of just 16 writers and poets depicted on the Scott Monument in Edinburgh.