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. Frankie Boyle, mainly known for rude comedy and scabrous political satire, has graduated into an extremely fine author with his first novel, Meantime. It’s a tough offering, interwoven with his acute and distinctive style of in-your-face presentation. Thriller-writing, she says, is “the job for an angry loner”. She looks across to Boyle and adds drily, “I don’t know if that’s something that appeals to you”, which brings forth a big guffaw from the comedian. 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.

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). The characters come to life with a clarity that is very solid and quite unusual, especially in a first novel, as they stand beside you as you are reading. All avid readers will know the joy of seeing them moulded in their mind as the clarity of the personalities slowly become clear and adds a great dimension to the story. No,” he says, “because it was just like, what do I like to read? And maybe that’s part of this thing of not really needing to earn a living from it.” Giving his narrator a drug-fogged worldview is also in part a reaction to “this modern thing of people being incredibly emphatic. It partly comes from social media where everybody’s very polemical all the time, and I think it’s difficult to communicate that way.” The city of Glasgow makes for an ideal landscape to set this bleak yet perversely refreshing and hugely enjoyable piece of work. This certainly put me in mind of a lot of Christopher Brookmyre’s better stuff, but whilst still retaining a distinctive Boyle signature, which gives it its own offbeat and delightful spark. 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.

If you like Frankie Boyle you'll more than likely enjoy this. The jury is still out for me. I don't mind a bit of his endless simile style delivery but I do get bored of it after a while. Its almost done to death in the first third. 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 Observer 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.

I do think you should lose your audience if you’re doing anything worth a damn,” she replies. “Because the thing is, you fight to become a writer. And then you find you’re in a big corporate machine. And what they want you to do is write the same book over and over again. You will face this pressure, if you haven’t already. So if you look at the pattern of my career, it’s one for them, one for me. The way I used to work a bar.” Meantime by Frankie Boyle review – the comedian’s dark, funny Glasgow noir debut 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! Nevertheless, Frankie Boyle persevered with his typically abrasive style that shied away from no topic.

I think there's a crime story in this book - ok so there definitely is, but it's not really all that front and centre, there's so much more going on around and about it that it does, on occasion, get lost in the noise. So, if you are looking to read this as a pure crime book, you might be disappointed. 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.” The comedian Frankie Boyle is the latest in a rash of television personalities trying their hand at crime fiction; but, as you might expect from somebody who titled one of his tours I Would Happily Punch Every One of You in the Face, Boyle is not joining his fellow celebs at the cosy end of the crime spectrum. There are no sleuthing pensioners or vicars here: our amateur detective/narrator is Felix McAveety, a Glaswegian junkie. 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.

A friend of Frankie Boyle’s, he tells us, stopped watching standup because it’s either “clever but not funny, or funny but not clever”. Boyle, of course, is an exception: his work makes you think, or has you marvelling at its merciless vision, even as it prompts laugh after appalled laugh. It also, these days, questions itself. As on his 2019 tour, the Glaswegian is still puzzling out the value of his nasty comedy in our ever-nastier world. Are necrophilia gags justifiable? Should he only tell jokes whose ethical intentions are clear? Meantime captures the banal and lively existence of being Glaswegian like a seesaw that drops you into oblivion. There are many downs, but it’s occasionally peppered with some good. It holds a different kind of magic, one where the disappointment from the referendum eats at the shoes of people walking to work, hailing taxis, and people on serious comedowns in dingy wee flats that contain all the hope of a mouldy pizza sitting on the countertop. Felix McAveety’s life has always been the sad rendition of unrealised potential. The death of his friend, Marina, is the fuse to allow himself to care about something again. 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 If this is Frankie having mellowed out, as he insists through the duration of his new Fringe show Lap Of Shame, I’d be terrified to have reviewed him earlier. Mina instantly warms to this theme, noting that Chandler had worked with Billy Wilder (they co-wrote Double Indemnity but didn’t like each other), who was writing what Mina calls “that kind of staccato dialogue”. She posits the theory that the novelist may have stolen the technique from the director-screenwriter.

I'd give it 7/10 if I was able. I'd say I enjoyed slightly over two thirds but the other third appeared to simply be a manual on what drugs to take and when and what they did to our protagonist. And my final comment which I think is quite key to the whole thing. It's a bit tongue in cheek and doesn't take itself that seriously - which, for me, made it all the more enjoyable and easy to read. I wonder if he has another book in the pipeline. I'd definitely be up for more of the same... 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.

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. 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. The story spins from Felix himself becoming a suspect, to him leading Donnie and himself into dire straits and real danger. This is in no way a comedy read, but throughout the book there are rare and clever inserts that will make the reader smile, or sometimes gasp, as the hapless pair, boosted up by regular top-ups of drugs, ply their way into the deepest parts of criminal Glasgow. The swearing is constant and not for the delicate reader, but the overpowering personalities of the would-be detectives make their language sound almost normal and thus surprisingly acceptable. “Fascinating mixture” Meantime is beautiful in its harsh and brutal narrative. The writing is crystal clear, each word soaks into your skin like the bleak Scottish rain. No happy endings but it is intricate, it settled under my skin and had me craving more. Every mistake carves a deep and unsettling wound. If one sentence could sum it up it would be that.Boyle is a longtime reader of crime fiction, citing Ellroy as one of his favourite authors. By contrast, Mina was not a particular fan of the genre before entering it, although she’d been thinking about writing a novel for the previous 12 years. “I thought it was like being a pop star,” she recalls, “an exciting idea, but how would you even go about that?” So far Boyle appears to have pleased the critics. The Observer reviewer, who happened to be Merritt, gave it a rave notice, calling it “enjoyably dark and entertaining”. The Daily Telegraph called the book “a gloriously funny treat of a novel”. How does it feel to get support from that quarter? “I’ll take it,” he says, although he admits that he hasn’t fully read the Telegraph review. “I don’t know that the paywall dropped long enough for me to finish it,” he quips. In this light his tanned, bloated head looked not unlike a haunted paper bag, his glazed eyes fixed on some bleak internal horizon.”