Meantime: The gripping debut crime novel from Frankie Boyle

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How do you solve a murder when you don’t have a clue? Frankie Boyle’s gripping crime debut novel, Meantime, is a hallucinogenic ride through Glasgow as one man seeks justice for his friend’s murder. Yeah,” says Mina, “but it’s brilliant because it does feel like a modern-day Chandler book. I nearly complimented you there,” she adds, fixing her piercing eyes on Boyle. “If we were on Scottish soil we’d be engaged.” Partners in crime: Boyle and Mina. Photograph: Pål Hansen/The Observer No,” he says, “because it was just like, what do I like to read? And maybe that’s part of this thing of not really needing to earn a living from it.” Giving his narrator a drug-fogged worldview is also in part a reaction to “this modern thing of people being incredibly emphatic. It partly comes from social media where everybody’s very polemical all the time, and I think it’s difficult to communicate that way.” I think there's a crime story in this book - ok so there definitely is, but it's not really all that front and centre, there's so much more going on around and about it that it does, on occasion, get lost in the noise. So, if you are looking to read this as a pure crime book, you might be disappointed.

And my final comment which I think is quite key to the whole thing. It's a bit tongue in cheek and doesn't take itself that seriously - which, for me, made it all the more enjoyable and easy to read. I wonder if he has another book in the pipeline. I'd definitely be up for more of the same... The city of Glasgow makes for an ideal landscape to set this bleak yet perversely refreshing and hugely enjoyable piece of work. This certainly put me in mind of a lot of Christopher Brookmyre’s better stuff, but whilst still retaining a distinctive Boyle signature, which gives it its own offbeat and delightful spark. Warming to the theme of complex plotting, Mina then tells the famous story of Howard Hawks, the director of The Big Sleep, cabling Chandler to ask who killed one of the characters – a question that none of the film’s scriptwriters, including William Faulkner, could answer. Chandler couldn’t help either and Hawks eventually decided that strong character development was more important than narrative coherence. The story spins from Felix himself becoming a suspect, to him leading Donnie and himself into dire straits and real danger. This is in no way a comedy read, but throughout the book there are rare and clever inserts that will make the reader smile, or sometimes gasp, as the hapless pair, boosted up by regular top-ups of drugs, ply their way into the deepest parts of criminal Glasgow. The swearing is constant and not for the delicate reader, but the overpowering personalities of the would-be detectives make their language sound almost normal and thus surprisingly acceptable. “Fascinating mixture” That brings forth another volley of laughter from the comedian, and it strikes me, not for the first time, that it’s Mina who’s the more natural comic performer – no wonder she told that agent she did standup comedy.

I was reading that Don DeLillo book White Noise, where people just discourse. For instance, there’s this long passage in it about the dollar gap in the 1970s, which I think is really interesting – although most editors would probably want that out. Anyway, I thought it would be quite funny to do something like that, and it fitted in with the narrator being drunk and drugged a lot of the time that he might just ramble.” Reads like a twisted Caledonian take on Robert Altman's The Long Goodbye. Inherent vices and scalpel-sharp jokes vie with a very human concern for those least garlanded in the rat race of life' Ian Rankin This is Scottish comedian Frankie Boyle's debut novel and being a fan of his brand of humour, I knew I just had to read this. It's a crime thriller but it very much reflects Boyle's previous tv and stand up work, in that it's not your conventional crime thriller. It's set in Glasgow just after the Scottish Independence referendum of 2014 and our protagonist Felix McAveety is unemployed, previously having worked at BBC Scotland and pretty much spends his time taking drugs, both the illegal and the prescription variety and washing them down with liberal doses of alcohol. His reasons for doing so are not initially apparent but are explained in a couple of harrowing chapters near the climax of the novel. Felix's best friend Marina is found murdered in a local park and initially Felix is deemed a prime suspect and is taken into custody but is soon released and suspecting Police incompetence and indifference, decides he'll investigate her death himself. He recruits his downstairs neighbour, Donnie, as his partner in crime, who unfortunately has an even greater appetite for illegal substances than Felix and they don't surprisingly get very far. Identifying the need for some 'professional' assistance, Felix manages to engage the services of Jan, an ex-Police Officer turned crime writer who is also fighting the battle against her terminal cancer diagnosis. Their investigation pits them up against a local crime lord, murderous political activists, a deranged stalker, a British Intelligence Officer and artificial intelligence, as they try to unravel a tangled web of drug dealing and corruption to identify Marina's killer. Boyle’s ability to throw out a short and pithy sentence that fits easily into the dialogue, so that the reader is hardly aware that a trademark suspect joke has been made, is actually quite a talent – and often very funny. Felix and every one of his friends take drugs profusely and are very knowledgeable about every one of them and what they do. To those of us who do not, it is a fascinating and horrific exposure that surprisingly gets to feel more normal and acceptable as the story continues. What emerges more than in his earlier shows is a sense of who Boyle is and what – aside from making us shudder – he stands for. Of course, the jokes are still nasty: the set opens in an arson-blaze of gags about paedophilia, as marathon man Jimmy Savile outruns his escaping prey, and cherubs evolve wings to slip the reach of lascivious priests. But the register changes when the routine graduates to pervy politicians. “They kill kids!”, bellows Boyle, for whom contested claims of Westminster child abuse pale next to the warmongering of which our political class seems not only unashamed, but proud.

Testing stuff. Walk-outs? There were a fair few but mainly, you sensed, because his audience drink hard without always considering bladder capacity. And bladders will be tested by involuntary guffaws, too – “I actually think Joe Biden has done pretty well for someone who doesn’t know he’s President” is at the lighter end of the spectrum, but it hits the spot even so. There are indeed many such digressions in Boyle’s book, which makes me think of something Mina once said in an interview. If you’ve got the attention of the reader with the whodunnit aspect of the plot, she said, “you can’t bore the tits off them with your view of the world”. If this is Frankie having mellowed out, as he insists through the duration of his new Fringe show Lap Of Shame, I’d be terrified to have reviewed him earlier. It jumps about and trails away, in ebbs and flows, which keep you engaged without having to pay too much attention. I enjoyed the entire story and liked the characters of Felix, Jane, Donnie, and Amy very much. I wish we'd had a bit more information about Amy earlier on, though reading to the end revealed an important plot point as to why this couldn't happen.Thriller-writing, she says, is “the job for an angry loner”. She looks across to Boyle and adds drily, “I don’t know if that’s something that appeals to you”, which brings forth a big guffaw from the comedian. Woody Allen had a similar realisation at the start of his career, Mina says, archly referring to the comedian-director as her “favourite guy”. “He used to do standup and just read the material he wrote for Sid Caesar, and then he realised that the audience don’t want that, they want someone that they want to spend time in the company of.” She stops herself suddenly, and looks at Boyle: “I’m explaining standup comedy to you.” If you like Frankie Boyle you'll more than likely enjoy this. The jury is still out for me. I don't mind a bit of his endless simile style delivery but I do get bored of it after a while. Its almost done to death in the first third. The main twist was learning about Felix's history, and I wish we'd heard a bit more about this story, perhaps in conversation with Jane? I would have liked more time to learn about him and his past in depth. The same goes for Jane and Amy - I feel that their characters were rushed off the scene to wrap things up, and so this is why I'm giving 4 stars. Boyle’s route into crime fiction has been more circuitous but with a much shorter gestation. Having written a couple of memoirs, including the memorably titled My Shit Life So Far, he found himself experimenting with a narrator’s voice but not with the intention of developing it into a novel. Then he started looking at a detective format and decided he wanted to examine the “postcolonial thing in Glasgow”.