Review of the comedians first crime novel

Frankie Boyle’s debut novel is no celebrity cash-in but an evocative – if sometimes messy – detective story set in Glasgow’s underclass, written with a satirical edge and the same crisp, direct writing that’s a hallmark of his comedy. Indeed many of the lines from Meantime have made it into his stand-up set – or maybe vice-versa.

If the whodunit is disorderly, it’s probably apt as our anti-hero is a prodigious drug user, forever trying to achieve the correct pharmaceutical balance between all the diazepam, Valium, benzos, acid, Rohypnol and dope in his system – although not, crucially, cocaine. 

Clarity is not Felix McAveety’s forte, but when his best friend, Marina, is found murdered in a Glasgow park and he is deemed the prime suspect, he decides to investigate the case himself. An unlikely detective, maybe, but if Sherlock Holmes could solve crimes on coke and morphine, maybe so, too, can he.

If he’s a lowlife, he’s a good-natured one, nihilistic and pessimistic but out to cause no harm. And, of course, he’s bitterly and dryly funny. It’s hard not to hear Meantime’s narration, or Felix’s speech, in anything other than Boyle’s voice. ‘You’d never get a Scottish version of The Matrix because anyone up here who was offered two pills would just gub both of them’, he muses. Or: ‘I left Twitter because of the death threats… Lorraine Kelly just didn’t seem to be reading them any more.’

In his quest, Felix is aided by Donnie, a man even more screwed up than he is, with ‘the emotional stability of a prison riot’, and a face that ‘looks like a collage made from elephant vaginas’, along with police detective turned bestselling crime writer Jane Pickford, who has her own reason not to be worrying too much about consequences.

Felix would be out of his depth in a puddle, so as he plunges into the worlds of nationalist politics (the action is set in the aftermath of the 2014 Scottish independence referendum) and artificial intelligence, the picture gets more muddled.

Boyle likes to muse on such topics and more besides – from the Large Hadron collider to Chinese stereotypes, from the misogyny of TV crime dramas to the evils of late-stage capitalism. 

These musings often push the detective story far into the background. Some provide amusing diversions, but others seem self-indulgent – especially the weight put on to the tedious theory that we are all living in a computer simulation, a key belief of one of the bad guys that is
bafflingly explored in a treatment for a TV show that the victim once pitched to BBC Scotland. 

Frustrating as some of these digressions are, Boyle’s key strength is in creating such a believable milieu, even when events are exaggerated, underpinned but never derailed by a tongue-in-cheek humour. 

His expressive, almost poetic, descriptions of Glasgow life in all its forms, are affectionate yet unsentimental, while his sympathy towards his characters, battered by the harsh winds of existence, is easily shared by the reader. That this unlikely cast of oddballs are as bluntly amusing as the author himself is also a huge asset.

• Meantime, by Frankie Boyle and published by Baskerville, is also available from Amazon priced £11.63 in hardback

Published: 12 Sep 2022