Does Felix – do any of the characters – have their own voice, or are they ventriloquist’s puppets for a string of Boyle-isms? It was full of witty one liners and dark humour and so it was very much the same tone as his comedy. Mikey – the manager of the Go-Go, who is in a relationship with the Scottish National Party (SNP) politician Gary Mount to gather intelligence for the British government. Frankie Boyle's gripping crime debut novel, Meantime, is a hallucinogenic ride through Glasgow as one man seeks justice for his friend's murder.

May, Marina's flatmate, tells Felix of her controlling relationship with Malcolm, a Large Hadron Collider conspiracy theorist.A slow-paced, sometimes reassuringly pedestrian trawl though the main plot-lines, leaves space to appreciate the language and embrace the observations. I saw a lot of other reviews finding the constant drug taking to be boring or inconsequential to the story but I believe this is justified later as a comment on self-medication.

He said of writing, in comparison to stand-up comedy, that "you don't have to go and sell it to people". And he regularly deploys the beautifully offbeat imagery that characterises the best of his stand-up. An overweight middle-aged guy who is struggling with his divorce but who also appears to have no internal filter – “We were the two people least suited to investigating anything, but with the right drug combinations we could be whoever we had to be. Of course they want everyone to stick to the rules of civility, because those rules stop people from asking them why they have all the fucking stuff.Jake Kerridge of The Daily Telegraph found that—similar to Raymond Chandler's novels—atmosphere-building, misanthropic jokes and social commentary are prioritised over plot and the message is not nihilistic as Felix is not amoral. In a haze of tranquilisers, hallucinogenics, and Valium, Felix McAveety decides to solve the murder of Marina, his best friend. Now if you've ever seen a Frankie Boyle routine or really listened to his very unique and colourful way of describing all manner of things, then you can probably already guess how the storytelling in this book is likely to go. Felix has a raging Valium addiction, isn’t shy to try other drugs and therefore, doesn’t have the greatest attention span, memory or level headedness. 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.