Their investigation sends them on a bewildering expedition that takes in Scottish radical politics, Artificial Intelligence, cults, secret agents, smugglers and vegan record shops. I was reading that Don DeLillo book White Noise, where people just discourse. For instance, there’s this long passage in it about the dollar gap in the 1970s, which I think is really interesting – although most editors would probably want that out. Anyway, I thought it would be quite funny to do something like that, and it fitted in with the narrator being drunk and drugged a lot of the time that he might just ramble.” Meantime is an unusual novel on many levels, and a triumph for Boyle, who proves he has more strings to his bow than probably anyone expected. 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. 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.

This was a funny wee detective story with a very absurd and unexpected protagonist. 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. Felix McAveety has heard that his ex girlfriend has been found murdered. Living in the lower part of Glasgow, Felix has known violence, but avoids it at all costs, and when he hears of Marina’s murder he decides, along with one of his nefarious friends, Donnie, to solve the murder himself. Yeah,” says Mina, “but it’s brilliant because it does feel like a modern-day Chandler book. I nearly complimented you there,” she adds, fixing her piercing eyes on Boyle. “If we were on Scottish soil we’d be engaged.” Partners in crime: Boyle and Mina. Photograph: Pål Hansen/The ObserverThere was notable resistance in small portions of the audience to come aboard with his brief discussions surrounding feminism and religion in what was otherwise a politics-heavy show, with one audience member being booted for interfering early in the set. I have a suspicion that there will be a strong correlation between people's attitude towards Frankie Boyle in general and their opinion of this book. The author can be something of a Marmite character and I suspect readers may react in a similar way to this novel. 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.

Boyle’s ability to throw out a short and pithy sentence that fits easily into the dialogue, so that the reader is hardly aware that a trademark suspect joke has been made, is actually quite a talent – and often very funny. Felix and every one of his friends take drugs profusely and are very knowledgeable about every one of them and what they do. To those of us who do not, it is a fascinating and horrific exposure that surprisingly gets to feel more normal and acceptable as the story continues. Boyle’s route into crime fiction has been more circuitous but with a much shorter gestation. Having written a couple of memoirs, including the memorably titled My Shit Life So Far, he found himself experimenting with a narrator’s voice but not with the intention of developing it into a novel. Then he started looking at a detective format and decided he wanted to examine the “postcolonial thing in Glasgow”. Either way the last third is much more coherent and funny but the first two thirds are reminiscent of others' work and I'd say both Burroughs and Hunter S Thompson did it better (or worse depending on your point of view).And so begins a bonkers romp, drug fuelled and, on occasion very very funny. Which takes our MC pretty much everywhere someone like me wouldn't dare go. Culminating in an ending that defied everything that came before. Brilliant! If someone decided to remake Trainspotting crossed with Columbo and it was co directed by the Coen Brothers and David Lynch then this is most likely what they would come up with. 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. 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.” But I think it’s the same in crime novels,” she carries on, “that the audience want to spend time in the company of that character.”