Meantime: The gripping debut crime novel from Frankie Boyle

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The narrator Felix is dependent on drugs and alcohol: Boyle thought this would fit with the digressive style that he had enjoyed reading, such as in White Noise (1985) by Don DeLillo. Though he had written non-fiction before, Meantime was Boyle's first novel; he wrote parts of the novel in hotels after stand-up performances and while wandering his hometown Glasgow. Docherty – an activist who Felix remembers from his bizarre scripts that he pitched to BBC Scotland.

There are a few twists and gotcha moments throughout the story and I found myself really engaged by these and the one-liners that are dashed throughout. 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. I’m very happy that my wife is also a fan of Boyle’s because I certainly said “Hey, can I read you this one part? 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.He has topped the podcast charts with the first three volumes of his eight volume Promethiad sequence. Another plus was that chapters were often about 10 pages each so it was very easily digestible and not at all difficult to let my tea go cold as I kept telling myself “one more chapter”.

Listening to Frankie Boyle for an hour or so is fine, but a stand-up routine of six hours or more is probably a bit more than I could cope with in one hit. When his friend, Marina, is found murdered in a local park, drug addict Felix McAveety finds himself becoming an amateur private detective as he seeks not only to clear himself of suspicion, but also to track down who was really responsible. It contains all the deft wordplay you’d expect and a few well-aimed, drive-by satirical shots at political targets along the way. Boyle said at the Edinburgh Book Festival in 2022: "I would much rather, if I could, segue into writing novels and just stay in the house and not travel so much".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. There are some great bits in towards the end but you've got to wade through quite a bit of unreliable drug-fuelled narration before that.