Meantime: The gripping debut crime novel from Frankie Boyle

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By now we’re all sweating like Edward G Robinson in Key Largo, and it’s time for the two crime novelists, veteran and novice, to prepare for their closeups. Mina says a young photographer recently took her photo and made her look like “a teabag that’s been left on the windowsill”, and with that memorable image she goes off to change. I do think you should lose your audience if you’re doing anything worth a damn,” she replies. “Because the thing is, you fight to become a writer. And then you find you’re in a big corporate machine. And what they want you to do is write the same book over and over again. You will face this pressure, if you haven’t already. So if you look at the pattern of my career, it’s one for them, one for me. The way I used to work a bar.” Meantime by Frankie Boyle review – the comedian’s dark, funny Glasgow noir debut 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. So far Boyle appears to have pleased the critics. The Observer reviewer, who happened to be Merritt, gave it a rave notice, calling it “enjoyably dark and entertaining”. The Daily Telegraph called the book “a gloriously funny treat of a novel”. How does it feel to get support from that quarter? “I’ll take it,” he says, although he admits that he hasn’t fully read the Telegraph review. “I don’t know that the paywall dropped long enough for me to finish it,” he quips. I can’t remember the last book I read where I laughed out loud so much, was fascinated by the odd and endearing characters and didn’t really mind what the plot was.

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. Writing a crime novel now appears to be a well-established rung on the career ladder of white male television entertainers, achieved with varying degrees of success and skill, so it’s a relief to find that Frankie Boyle’s first work of fiction is an enjoyably dark and entertaining tranche of Glasgow noir. It contains all the deft wordplay you’d expect of him, and a few well-aimed, drive-by satirical shots at political targets along the way.Meantime is beautiful in its harsh and brutal narrative. The writing is crystal clear, each word soaks into your skin like the bleak Scottish rain. No happy endings but it is intricate, it settled under my skin and had me craving more. Every mistake carves a deep and unsettling wound. If one sentence could sum it up it would be that. I’m not going to lie. I’ve been putting off writing this review. Not for any bad reason, I’m just not sure I know where to begin. This is perhaps the most unconventional crime thriller (?) I’ve read in quite some time. And that turns out to be a good thing. Kind of bonkers, often funny, sometimes unexpectedly poignant, this is a murder mystery investigation the like of which I have definitely not read before. When your lead character, and part time suspect, is a self confessed stoner, and the very varied group of friends who help him really aren’t much better, you kind of get a hint of where this book is likely to lead. Or so you’d think. This is a Frankie Boyle novel. I guess conventional and expected are really the last things I should be looking for, right? Actually, it doesn’t get much worse than that. Threading through the set is palpable indignation – about working-class lives and appalling failures of the system: for instance, there’s a brutal rape joke that alludes to the Sarah Everard case, but the target is unequivocally the government and police. Few escape his contempt – be it high-profile Tories, Keir Starmer (“‘My dad was a tool-maker’ – of course he was, he made you”) or Nicola Sturgeon (“who can squint with her whole face”). He doesn’t spare himself – dismally dating at 49 and past his spunky prime, which he enlarges on in unprintable terms; equally unrepeatable are his barbs about Prince Andrew. This was a funny wee detective story with a very absurd and unexpected protagonist. There’s lots of humour throughout, as you would expect from Frankie Boyle, but I enjoyed the layers of dark conspiracy that made up the mystery that Felix sets out to uncover. Having laughed an indecent amount during Lap of Honour, I feel compelled to restate the case for his defence, which is that Boyle valuably confronts us with our moral putrefaction, his darkness descriptive of our age’s turpitude. As his debut novel, the best-selling crime thriller Meantime confirms, he combines immaculate turns of phrase with the grubbiest trains of thought. His parents were Irish, he grew up in Glasgow; at his finest, you get a glimpse of Wilde, lying in the gutter at pub closing time.

There is another obvious draw of crime fiction: it sells. Its popular exponents sell a huge amount, but it’s a big, baggy category that necessarily contains James Ellroy and Agatha Christie, one moment unblinking visions of street life, the next decorous detection among the upper classes. 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 Nevertheless, Frankie Boyle persevered with his typically abrasive style that shied away from no topic.

The comedian Frankie Boyle is the latest in a rash of television personalities trying their hand at crime fiction; but, as you might expect from somebody who titled one of his tours I Would Happily Punch Every One of You in the Face, Boyle is not joining his fellow celebs at the cosy end of the crime spectrum. There are no sleuthing pensioners or vicars here: our amateur detective/narrator is Felix McAveety, a Glaswegian junkie. Mina instantly warms to this theme, noting that Chandler had worked with Billy Wilder (they co-wrote Double Indemnity but didn’t like each other), who was writing what Mina calls “that kind of staccato dialogue”. She posits the theory that the novelist may have stolen the technique from the director-screenwriter. Boyle adopts the persona of a precious critic: “‘Should these sort of people be allowed to write books or should we kill them?’ But a bad book is not going to get published, anyway.” Felix McAveety has heard that his ex girlfriend has been found murdered. Living in the lower part of Glasgow, Felix has known violence, but avoids it at all costs, and when he hears of Marina’s murder he decides, along with one of his nefarious friends, Donnie, to solve the murder himself. 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.

But I think it’s the same in crime novels,” she carries on, “that the audience want to spend time in the company of that character.” Marina is dead, Felix is a suspect. But he also an addict - big time - and spends the majority of his life out of his head. So he could have done it, but he suspects not, he sort of has an alibi. He is our narrator and, as you can expect from a man of his "highs" the story is somewhat confusing in places. He also enlists several of his friends and associates to assist him in his endeavours to discover the real murderer as he believes that the Police don't really care.Set in the aftermath of the 2014 Scottish independence referendum, Meantime is narrated by Felix McAveety, a Valium addict and aspiring writer whose best friend, Marina, is found murdered in a Glasgow park – news Felix first learns when he’s woken by police demanding a sperm sample. Finding himself a suspect, Felix and his overweight neighbour, Donnie, also partial to mind-altering substances, decide to undertake their own investigation: “We were the two people least suited to investigating anything, but with the right drug combinations we could be whoever we had to be.” I'm not going to lie. I've been putting off writing this review. Not for any bad reason, I'm just not sure I know where to begin. This is perhaps the most unconventional crime thriller (?) I've read in quite some time. And that turns out to be a good thing. Kind of bonkers, often funny, sometimes expectedly poignant, this is a murder mystery investigation the like of which I have definitely not read before. When your lead character, and part time suspect, is a self confessed stoner, and the very varied group of friends who help him really aren't much better, you kind of get a hint of where this book is likely to lead. Or so you'd think. This is a Frankie Boyle novel. I guess conventional and expected are really the last things I should be looking for, right?

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. Meantime is an unusual novel on many levels, and a triumph for Boyle, who proves he has more strings to his bow than probably anyone expected. An expected triumph in every sense of the word, go add Frankie Boyle to your Fringe watchlist. Twice. 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. Oh and remember who the author is before you make comment about the language. Informed choice and all that jazz... That said, it was all in context.

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... 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.” 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.