Jake Kerridge

MEANTIME by Frankie Boyle

360pp, Baskerville, £14.99, ebook £8.49 ★★★★ ★

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.

Felix, formerly a comedy writer at BBC Scotland (allowing Boyle to lob several satirical grenades at the Corporation), has become a drop-out following a life-changing disaster. When his best friend is murdered, however, he surprises himself by summoning the willpower to investigate, albeit ineptly.

It’s impossible to read this book without hearing Boyle in your head as the riffing narrator. The battery of searing one-liners is aimed at familiar Boyle targets: capitalists, smug liberals, censorious millennials and Scotland (“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”). And he regularly deploys the beautifully offbeat imagery that characterises the best of his stand-up. On our penchant for military statues: “This was Britain, and if you killed enough foreigners they let you ride a metal horse into the future.”

The plot borders on the nonsensical at times, and is basically a support mechanism for atmospherics, social comment and jokes – but then the same is true of Raymond Chandler’s novels. Boyle is also like Chandler in being pretty soft under the hard-boiled surface – Felix may be a car-crash, but he’s decent in every way that matters, and the book is far from nihilistic despite the default misanthropy of its gags. And really, if Boyle hates us all so much, why has he gifted us this gloriously funny treat of a novel?