Meantime: The gripping debut crime novel from Frankie Boyle

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It is of course very funny, as I found Boyle's descriptions of places and in particular people, especially Donnie, to be hilarious. Meantime was Boyle's first fiction book, [2] though he had previously authored four non-fiction works: the autobiography My Shit Life So Far (2009); a collection of his columns from The Sun titled Work!

Imagine Withnail and I stumbling into a Bond movie co-written by William McIlvanney and Mick Herron . I didn't really understand how it was solved and I'm not sure if I missed something or we're supposed to not get it. Frankie Boyle’s gripping crime debut novel, Meantime, is a hallucinogenic ride through Glasgow as one man seeks justice for his friend’s murder. Frankie Boyle's gripping crime debut novel, Meantime, is a hallucinogenic ride through Glasgow as one man seeks justice for his friend's murder.

Thankfully, although not an unbridled success, Frankie Boyle has made a better stab at it than many. Even now I'm finished I'm not entirely clear if Marina was murdered, who killed her or if Felix even unravelled it (it seemed much more likely to be the work of the ex-cop who seems ridiculously willing to help a man who can't keep his eyes open half the time. The evolution of the characters works wonderfully, especially Felix: piecing together his personal story is on a par with trying to solve the crime he's investigating. When his best friend is murdered, however, he surprises himself by summoning the willpower to investigate, albeit ineptly.

I fought the urge to give up several times as I became slightly bewildered by the ‘picaresque’ (more like rambling and disjointed) plot and the abundance of vaguely minor characters who flit in and out. Reading the blurb for this book (on multiple occasions) I could not get my head around what it was going to be like.Not known for being exactly shy and retiring in his comedy, I was intrigued to see how his style translated to crime fiction. If you ask me to place the book in some type of genre, I’d say it's a dark and humorous murder mystery but also quirky and unique. Not to worry though, he ropes in help from a very broad range of different people, including a successful crime novelist, a GP and his fellow drug addict neighbour. Boyle worked on the book while in hotel rooms after stand-up routines, unable to sleep due to adrenaline. 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.

This might seem slightly tautologous, but if you like Frankie Boyle’s style of comedy, you will like his novel; and if you don’t, you shan’t. John Dugdale of The Times compared Meantime to the book Inherent Vice (2009) by Thomas Pynchon, which features a cannabis-consuming detective and mixes crime fiction with political satire.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”). He said of writing, in comparison to stand-up comedy, that "you don't have to go and sell it to people".