I sure have,” he concedes, “but I thought it would be good to do someone who was less staccato and had more doubt because if you want to digress a fair bit into aspects of culture or society it wouldn’t work as well with someone who was very polemical.”

She published her first thriller, the critically acclaimed Garnethill , 24 years ago when she was 32. Boyle, who turns 50 next month, has just made his debut with Meantime, a tale of a Glaswegian addict who haphazardly investigates the murder of his best friend. It boasts impressive tributes from Mina and Ian Rankin on its cover. “A darkest noir, unputdownable crime novel”, says Mina, while Rankin describes it as a “twisted Caledonian take on Altman’s The Long Goodbye”, referring to the subversive 70s film adaptation of Raymond Chandler’s finest Philip Marlowe novel. 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.” Mina suggests that hardboiled crime novelists are able to explore “working-class social history” in a way that isn’t dull or worthy but is instead propelled by a powerful imagination. The last 10 chapters were undoubtedly my favourite section of the book. Nevertheless, I felt that they were throwing plot twists quite fast and accelerating the story to a pace we'd not met before, almost as if there was a challenge to finish the book soon and squeeze it all in!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. 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.”

I almost gave up after a couple of hours. Obviously this book is heavy on drug taking and I found that got a bit tedious. Yes I know, not the author’s fault. The book cover has a psychedelic pill on it after all. 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. Throw in a very poignant and touching ending and you will have a read like no other that will bring out all the emotions in you. Without spoiling too much, in the final few chapters of MEANTIME, Frankie writes about grief and regret in a way that absolutely crushed me. I had tears in my eyes on more than a few occasions. To have the ability to convey feelings the way he did either suggests maybe his own past trauma or an incredibly special talent to relate to that level of loss on that deep of a level. 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.

Some aspects made it hard to suspend disbelief. For example, the lead character feels the police are inept so he will investigate his friend’s murder himself. Not once did anyone say “I have already spoken with the police”. However inept, this was a murder investigation so you would think there might be more investigation happening by the police. In reality there would be In this light his tanned, bloated head looked not unlike a haunted paper bag, his glazed eyes fixed on some bleak internal horizon.” Boyle has said that he was an alcoholic until he was 26, when he quit drinking, and he’s also spoken about using various drugs. He mentions that he wrote My Shit Life So Far on ecstasy. So what was the reason for making his narrator someone who is constantly under the influence of one drug or another? 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. A darkest noir, unputdownable crime novel that swerves and surprises, with a gut-punch ending. I loved it!’ Denise Mina, author of The Long Drop

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 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?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. 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. You know the type, where you look around making sure you’re okay with the fact that you and room full of people are laughing about Frankie’s planned assassination of The Queen. 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 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.