Irvine Welsh: Punk Auteur. Realist. Feminist. Fearless. Apologetic? Watered Down? Campy?

Like it or lump it, the literary industry is now no different from Hollywood, gaming, television and music. All are owned by some form of a giant corporation and like Warner Brothers, Universal, HBO or even Take-Two Interactive, The Big Five are the big fatcat conglomerate overseeing the literary world. Books are expensive to produce and, as a result of the tightening hold of The Big Five, are explicitly written to market where profit, more profit and extra profit are the names of the game, and rightly so.

But one of the sad results of all this profit is riskier subject matter being on a seemingly downward spiral unless handled to a higher righteous standard, something I’ve sadly had to come to terms with. Still, with more and more folks deciding to do their own thing art-wise and media-wise (Hello, Joe Rogan, A24, and anyone else who wants to entertain instead of pander), I couldn't help but think, why not? But less about me and more about others, because occasionally, a real newcomer breaks through with something fresh and challenging to categorise. Most recently, while working in the Middle East, I enjoyed Declan Toohey’s Perpetual Comedown, a piece of unadulterated literary fiction, a genre nearly unseen nowadays. It was hilarious, shocking, sad, and utterly bleak at times; it also took risks, one of which was so subtle and intelligent that it managed to be accusing without pointing fingers. And its epilogue made me wake my neighbours up from laughter.

I would learn this a week later amidst my third reading of American Psycho. For three years, my reading time took place during my 04:00 am start. Alarm; listen to the Fajr outside; read for forty-five minutes and then work on my project before showering and running to work. But it was Ramadan the week I was reading American Psycho, and one afternoon the neighbour appeared to gift me some dates as thanks for the good-natured laughter. Little did she know what I was laughing at…

As I said in my previous post, “art is the final frontier of a safe space to push the moral, political and social taboos without hurting anyone,” and as far as I’m concerned, nothing represents this better than American Psycho.

While it is undeniably one of my favourite novels, I bear utter contempt for everything else Bret Easton Ellis wrote – and they’re morbid too – and I respect that he never apologised even after the death threats and the dropping from Simon & Schuster after some virtuous leaking of the stomach-churningly violent scenes without context, completely misrepresenting the book’s satirical intent. And it was Irvine Welsh’s introduction in the later editions that made me adore it more. He rightfully mocks the childishness of the average person believing that the mindset of a protagonist equals that of the creator, and would retain this mindset for ten of his novels, and drop it on his last three. A quick disclaimer here, if you haven’t read any Irvine Welsh novel but plan on it, return to this post after you have.

I was thirteen when I first read Trainspotting and with its unending pop culture references, fully realised characters and laugh-out-loud moments, many moons later I would make the bold claim that the novel was my own personal Bible, Quran and Torah, saying that as somebody who read all three.

Novel after novel, Welsh would shock me and make me laugh uncontrollably, though sometimes as I grew older, I couldn’t help but feel distaste for his overtly sexualised portrayal of women. I have no problem with contextualised sexualisation, but sometimes, I felt Welsh veering too much into leerful territory, particularly with Nicky’s slightly lads-magazine-ish depiction in Porno, and certain moments in Glue. Now, I understand that for the most part, Welsh is depicting a sleazy world; that’s not the problem. The problem is when his female point of views come off as more erotica than anything else.

Glue was an epic about the friendship of four individuals and the trials and tribulations of life. Its central characters, Juice Terry, Gally, Carl and Billy constantly spun between likeable and unlikable, and at first I struggled with it, being such a fan of Renton, Begbie, Sick Boy and Spud (who all appear in Glue, since Welsh’s novels take place in the same universe) but eventually, I found myself endeared by its hilarity, tragedy and strange warmth.

But just as I was beginning to think that this was Welsh’s most mature work, there came – near the end – the introduction of its first “in-depth” female characters with “Cocks oot for the lassies,” essentially shunning that idea.

For fuck sake, Irvine.

Nonetheless, I still champion Welsh as my favourite author and one I would label a primary influence on my own work. But I have in fact noticed somewhat of a retraction of his American Psycho statement, not said directly by him, but written through his last three novels, The Blade Artist, Dead Men’s Trousers and The Long Knives.

Mostly unflattering female depictions aside, Welsh’s stories always dealt with deep rooted societal issues; the moral standing of the work itself was always clear but it never beat readers over the head, similar to how Ellis centred his masterpiece around materialism at its absolute worst. Everything was subtle and had so much hilarious tongue-in-cheek nihilism, each novel would require re-reads to grasp the overall messages.

An example of such subtlety can be seen in Welsh’s brilliant but often overlooked second novel, Marabou Stork Nightmares, the story of a football hooligan who switches narratives between his coma, his life story, and a fantasy land that he has concocted within his coma. If you're a fan of The Sopranos, the episodes Join the Club and Mayham are the closest we'll ever get to seeing a live action version of this novel. Easily Welsh’s most disturbing work, it instantly came to mind when I read Louise O’Neill’s Asking For It, but for the wrong reasons.

Stork Nightmares is undoubtedly a feminist novel, just not capturing it the way one would expect. Its themes of gender-based violence violate the gut so aggressively, that it’s what makes his later depictions of women so disappointing.

O’Neill’s first two works had her pegged to be the Irish Margaret Attwood; they were allegedly “ultra feminist; ultra aware,” and O’Neill’s messages were so indented on every page that they were impossible to miss. But her lack of subtlety and bludgeoning the public with claims that her books were forewarnings made them feel strangely contrived, for O’Neill wrote explicitly to market like all corporately sponsored artists. Her proceedings were tactical; she knew her audience and fair play to her. But twenty-six years earlier, Trainspotting emerged with zero marketable criteria and was more or less a series of loosely-connected stories from the lives of a massive group of friends. But because of Welsh’s contacts within the industry, he secured a deal, not thinking much would come out of it or that it wouldn't be the iconic piece of punk literature that it is to this very day.

Asking For It never convinced me as it had my university pals, and despite my agreeing with O’Neill’s overall message regarding the very real powerlessness against the very real systemic dismissal of sexual violence, I found the novel strangely exploitative and superficial, especially with how she copied realworld incidents and pasted them into an allegedly Irish setting. Even those of my pals who fawned over her at the time had admitted to that. I also found that the very industries that O’Neill claimed so whole-heartedly to be against – despite her being part of them – was the enabler of the elitism, prejudices and smearing she depicted.

That’s a post for another day.

But recently, I found that once these friends experienced the real world, many abandoned the collective university hive mind and realised that Asking For It was more exploitative than compassionate, especially when mispresenting certain cultural mediums to facilitate her points. Do our laws handling sexual violence need a lot of work? Absolutely, but in the novel, far too many contrivances pleaded with one to disband their disbelief, no matter how unbelievable it seemed.

One glaring example was how Emma O’Donoghue’s very obvious rape got handled. I struggled to accept that a school and a town would behave in favour of the perpetrators, especially when there was unambiguous evidence of what had happened to Emma. Non-consensually posting depraved images was always something I recalled people shunning, for I thankfully witnessed two zero-tolerance incidents when I was fourteen (that’s 2010, five years before Asking For It). I also believe that any father whose daughter had experienced such horrific violation would never be so emasculated as not to pursue action against those who took the pictures. If my parents were in that position, the only court case would have been over a Last-House-On-The-Left-style multiple homicide. Whether the novel was poking at crap parenting or saying “All parents are like this”, it wasn’t clear, especially in the scene near the end when Emma decides not to press charges, and her mother says, “They’re good boys, really,” about her daughter’s rapists. An infuriating and stomach-churning moment for sure, but what exactly is that saying about parenting?

Stork Nightmares deals with similar issues, and the protagonist, Roy Strang, may be one of the most disgusting literary characters ever put to paper. Let me remind folks that American Psycho has some genuinely horrific murder scenes, most of which are directed at women, but what makes Patrick Bateman easier to stomach – in my opinion – is that he’s so utterly ridiculous that he’s impossible to take seriously. There’s also a probable lack of reliability in his accounts.

But Strang, despite him not killing anyone throughout, is one evil bastard, and because the novel forces readers into his head, Stork Nightmares, while having some darkly funny moments, is the only novel I’ve needed breaks from (and possibly what desensitised me to A Little Life). The central setpiece is the prolonged violent rape of a young woman by a gang of football hooligans and her court case. The gang’s lawyer succeeds with all the usual female character defamation stunts to absolve them. However, Strang, claiming himself as the more considerate perpetrator, is overcome with guilt until his attempted suicide spawns the coma and dream sections.

But the victim, Kirsty, reappears at his bedside and reveals that Strang is an unreliable narrator. His self-descriptions were lies, as were possibly his assertions about his crazy family (I always found his parents oddly lovable despite their insanity). But the absolute truth is that he and one other toerag were her only rapists, while the rest of the gang pleaded with them to stop. Their actual accounts in the court were true, though they never informed the court of what happened, likely due to them being terrified of Strang. Welsh’s later depiction of women disappoints me because, during the revelatory scene, he manages to make sadness overcome disgust as the victim asks why Strang enacted such horror. And then it ends with her heroically castrating and killing him.

Stork Nightmares, I think, is a far superior feminist novel to Asking For It. While Trainspotting had Renton mockingly paraphrase the anti-heroin slogan “Choose Life…” while he was injecting obscene amounts of heroin into every body part he could, Stork Nightmares splattered “Zero Tolerance” across its latter half. Zero Tolerance, a slogan dedicated to fighting violence towards women, appears frequently throughout the lead-up to the “big twist” though that “twist” wasn’t difficult to predict, judging Strang’s earlier antics. But it’s interesting that despite Welsh implenting an actual educational slogan, the book never feels as though it's beating readers over the head with its anti-violence towards women message, even with the very last paragraph being one gigantic Z when Strang dies.

What has any of this got to do with Welsh being apologetic? It’s the change in style and characters. Yes, Stork Nightmares had clear underlying messages, but it was also darkly funny in parts and so rich in characterisation that no matter how much I hated Roy Strang, I still couldn’t help but see him as this fully realised person with interests and hobbies. That’s what made Welsh’s tackling the very real horror of rape culture more educational than our supposed Irish champion; it shows readers how toxic masculinity and entitlement are created, and the harms, heartbreak and traumas it inflicts and makes one reflect on the terrifying fact that these vile people walk among us. Meanwhile, Asking For It’s characters and dialogue were akin to an episode of Fair City than real-life. Emma O’Donaghue being unlikable was so contrived to the point of nearly being a caricature as opposed to a character; neither she, nor the other characters felt like they could really exist.

For me, Asking For It absolutely failed on a deeper level to educate.

Filth’s sequel, Crime, centred on a previous supporting character, Ray Lennox, fleeing from a paedophile ring in Florida. While Filth was very much a police novel about a detective who went out of his way to avoid solving a murder, it was, first and foremost, like Stork Nightmares, a character study with a very loose plot. Crime, however, was a thriller. It’s always commendable to witness an artist break free of their comfort zone; when Welsh did so, he completely missed his mark, further exemplified by The Bedroom Secrets of the Master Chefs and The Sex Lives of Siamese Twins – the latter of which I didn’t even finish.

As a Welsh fan, things didn’t seem promising, despite the brilliant Skagboys between Crime and Siamese Twins. Then came A Decent Ride, set against the backdrop of Hurricane Bawbag in 2011 and centring on the exploits of Juice Terry from Glue, now a cab driver, drug peddler and porn actor; Jonty McKay, a simpleton; and Ronald Checker, an obvious Trump iteration.

A Decent Ride was Welsh’s last truly unapologetic work and the last to tackle morbid issues without the watering down and campiness that his future works would adopt. Were his female characters depicted as before? Yes, and prostitution is depicted more in-depth this time, but Juice Terry, for all his faults – and he’s full of them – is ironically probably one of Welsh’s most progressive characters. Yes, he’s a womanising porn actor, but he also shows great respect for the opposite sex throughout.

Like all previous Welsh iterations, A Decent Ride makes for a squirmful read. Its sordid themes include: necrophilia, Islamaphobia, incestuous rape, obesity, suicide and smoking addiction. There’s even a scene where a corpse is exhumed so its penis size can be measured. And like previous Welsh novels, amidst this insanity and horror, it’s also utterly hilarious and is another striking piece of work.

But that died in The Blade Artist, starring Francis Begbie. Few hardcore Welsh fans agreed with Begbie’s unrealistic retconning, and it was that and Dead Men’s Trousers that made me realise that Welsh was fringing around becoming apologetic for his previous novels. Begbie, once a low-level psychotic thug, had become an artist, Jim Francis, after adopting his American wife’s surname (Begbie? Really?! B–E–G–B–I–E?!) and family man living in Santa Barbara. Despite T2: Trainspotting being obviously far weaker than its predecessor (I mean, honestly, how do you even compete with that?), it still managed to capture Begbie as best as it possibly could, and I'll touch on Danny Boyle's adaption later. In The Blade Artist, Begbie's psychotic impulses are "under control" (he’s figured out how to commit carnage in secret).

The novel was another thriller, bringing Begbie home to Edinburgh from his California comforts to uncover his son’s murderer. It lacked humor, tried to mimick hard-boiled detective novels and had essentially turned Begbie into a Liam-Neesonesque figure with hammy dialogue and being miles ahead of his enemies. Its brilliant cliffhanger couldn’t quell my disappointment, and then there was the American aspect, which I brushed off originally until my second reading.

Welsh’s depiction of the American Ronald Checker character in A Decent Ride was intended to be comedic, for whenever the novel took on Checker’s point of view, the over the top, anxiety-ridden Americanisation added to the hilarity. I also couldn’t help but hear Trump’s voice as I read, making it ten times funnier. The Blade Artist, however, tries to inject seriousness into the American aspect of its plot, and on multiple occasions throughout my second readthrough, I would shake my head in shock, or facepalm, especially in the chapters with Begbie's wife, Melanie, or the alcoholic detective Harry. The newly romantic Begbie also doing salsa dancing was another shock to the system. I know Welsh wanted to do something new to make the character fresh again, but my God… Even worse was the sudden dangerousness of some of the gangster or hard men characters, something Welsh had taken the piss out of in all his previous books. In fact, this would be mocked again in Dead Men’s Trousers, which would lull me into false pretences, but before explaining that, I need to discuss another old character.

Other than Roy Strang and Bruce Robertson, Welsh has constantly written from the perspectives of unsavoury people but Simon Williamson (Sick Boy) is Welsh’s opus character, a fucked-up, somewhat of a junky swashbuckler, who very clearly was the epitome of Welsh's earlier support for Bret Easton Ellis.

Casual movie-going audiences will recognise Simon as the white-haired sneer played by Johnny Lee Miller, and while I adore Danny Boyle’s adaption, he barely captures Sick Boy. To meet the ninety-minute runtime, Boyle captures Trainspotting’s spirit, cutting most of the source material. Welsh’s series is another behemoth of world building similar to Game of Thrones and Lord of the Rings, with characters so steeped in personality that even capturing them through a television series would be impossible. It's the same as Begbie, though while the first film, as stated, captures the novel's spirit, T2: Trainspotting doesn't catch anything beyond seeing where the characters ended up, bearing just enough resemblances to their source material. Filth with James McAvoy is really the only adaption of Welsh's work that truly captures the source material, with a few adjustments to suit the film medium. The first Trainspotting, to a degree, captured the dark humor and plotless aspect of the novel, while its sequel was noticably toned down in comparison. This isn't recent "modern audience" bullshit, however, for Danny Boyle went this way following 28 Days Later. We won't count that travesty The Beach, but Shallow Grave, Trainspotting and 28 Days Later were Boyle at his peak before he went for lighter stories.

But while Welsh had so many memorable characters to his name, it was Sick Boy’s novel portrayal that roused me to adjust how I write. An Italian Scot and easily one of the most despicable, hilarious characters I’ve ever encountered in the literary world, he’s a diva, so saturated in narcissism and self-aggrandising that I can’t imagine Welsh writing a single sentence without chuckling like a schoolgirl. Sick Boy made me respect Welsh wholeheartedly as an artist; the author sticks to pushing this utter bastard and sees him through to the bitter end... until Dead Men’s Trousers. Is Sicky as bad as Roy Strang? No character could be, and Sick Boy is still pretty bad.

Sick Boy symbolises infinite clever possibilities within the framework of the world he occupies, and Welsh does this to damn near perfection. In 2012's Skagboys, a Trainspotting prequel, Welsh thrives in showing how this utter scumbag came to be. In Leith, Edinburgh, against the near post-apocalyptic backdrop of Thatcher’s reign, Simon David Williamson may be one of the rare few not to be fully affected by Thatcher, since an employment letter from the dole office nearly ruins his birthday.

Immediately, we are privy to his lecherous out-for-oneself behaviour as he leers after the sixteen-year-old Maria Anderson, and becomes determined to remove all obstacles to take her virginity. The steps to that include:

1. Getting her father Colin murdered, though Simon’s neglect is accidental.

2. Seducing Janey, Colin’s wife, and encouraging her to keep claiming her dead husband's benefits.

3. Reporting her for fraud, landing her in prison and leaving the teenage Maria vulnerable.

4. Amidst his spiralling heroin addiction, he learns that he wasn’t Maria’s first lay, gets her addicted and pimps her to other men, where she urinates on herself and culminates in him accidentally allowing her to be raped by her father’s killer, cleared of all charges.

The problem with discussing him in Trainspotting is that the novel is nowhere near as conventional as the prequel. What little plot there is mostly focuses on Renton, and Sick Boy, at this stage, is more nihilistic than before, cursing football and sex’s watering down, embarking on racist and homophobic rants of his battles against the world, and seeing relationships as transactional, ultimately ending in the demise of his and Renton’s friendship. Baby Dawn’s cot death in the chapter It Goes Without Saying sees him (then hinted to be the father) shakenly swear off junk, and later take to more sex trafficking. By the end, as Sick Boy readies for ditching Renton, he gets beaten to it when Renton flees with the money on their last heroin deal.

The opening of Porno a decade later sees Sick Boy amidst the London crack scene, his youthfulness and charm having declined, exploiting vulnerable young addicts and working a dead-end job in a strip club. Home calls however, with an offer of taking over a dive pub from his auntie, which sends him back to Edinburgh.

What follows is a disastrous porno shoot, reunification with Renton and series of hilariously long-winded scams. When filming begins, his once subtle behaviour grows erratic and his self-aggrandisation becomes so ridiculous that he almost resembles Hedley Lamar in Blazing Saddles. Several moments where Sick Boy gets so into himself that feeling a cocaine baggie in his pocket or a girl’s arse is the only way of calming himself down mirrors Hedley getting so into his nefarious plan that he dry humps a statue or tries to grab a breast.

Of course, Sicky crosses several lines, and what follows is single-handedly one of the funniest downfalls I’ve ever read. But again, Welsh does this without the moral whip.

With Dead Men’s Trousers, the so-far final part in the Mark Renton series, I enjoyed its plot, laugh-out-loud moments, horror imagery, the emotional punch as we bid farewell to one of Welsh’s more iconic characters, and the second-last chapter that gave me a sore chest. That chapter also made me shelve my originally intended debut novel, never to be seen again. But the book also fell flat; it seemed Welsh had completely disavowed his original American Psycho statement and had frustratingly also retconned Sick Boy. The Beastie Boys pulled the exact same shite back in 1998 and this is something I genuinely cannot stand, for all the artist is implying is that the toxicity they depicted was how they actually felt at the time and, as a result, that puts the original material in a more insidious light.

Obviously, Begbie’s jarring change is still present in DMT, and yes, characters changing is always a win. Still, Begbie, a fan favourite, originally a violent nutter and now a cunning serial killer, barely keeps its head above water. Begbie used to have some of the funniest lines of dialogue; now, as also seen in The Blade Artist, some of his dialogue is cringe-inducing and borders on Hollywoodesque contrivance.

While Sick Boy thankfully doesn't get annulled to that extent, he is noticeably toned down. He now runs an escort service, and uses Tinder to attract potential employees, but he’s not near morally dubious as before, and replaces his bleak life analogies with ones on Neoliberalism and mocks the ego-centrism of so-called hard men. I knew we were in trouble when I actually agreed with the character on something. A scene where his adult son comes out to him is oddly heartwarming, and the actual reason for Sick Boy's acceptance is certainly in line with Sick Boy’s characterisation, but it shouldn’t be heartwarming. That’s where DMT’s real problem enters; it’s less daring and uncomfortable than previous books, and locates loopholes to retain watered-down morbidity.

An example of Sicky’s retconning is his love interest, Marianne. He’s ruined her life; now she’s demanding a commitment, even going so far as to ride his brother-in-law, Euan, and Renton to get his attention. Her manipulation works, and this is the problem; it’s like Pheobe Waller-Bridge tailoring Bond for a modern audience (though I argue that Daniel Craig's tortured Bond had already been going that way since Casino Royale). Their romance comes across as a cheap sitcom-like plot device, like Charlie Sheen finally meeting his match.

Going back to Bret Easton Ellis, despite my distaste for every other novel he wrote, I always admired how the idea of celebratory fandom towards his works seemed to vex him more than the complaints. American Psycho is a novel that’s almost impossible to celebrate due to its graphic violence and misogyny, and I’m sure Ellis would not be overtly impressed to see illiterate gobshites using the film's depiction of Patrick Bateman as an apparent “alpha” figure as seen across social media.

But interestingly, when Ellis wrote Imperial Bedrooms, he rejected the sentimentality people had towards its predecessor, Less Than Zero, his literary debut. It was celebrated as a sentimental eighties tribute in the same way Ulysses is rightfully hailed as this great Dublin epic, and there are some similarities. Less Than Zero has a plotless, storyless structure and puts tremendous detail into recreating Los Angeles. But that’s where the similarities stop. And Ellis rejected readers’ sentimentality through protagonist Clay, a seemingly nihilistic but privileged youth in Beverly Hills, by making the character reject how Less Than Zero was written in the first few pages of Imperial Bedrooms – essentially addressing the readers. Clay was a disaffected rich fella who showed a few signs of humanity every now and again, but he wasn’t evil. But through Imperial Bedroom’s fourth wall literary device, we learn that the Clay in Imperial Bedrooms is the real Clay, a rapist, and far more sadistic and selfish than the one Ellis depicted in Less Than Zero. Confused? Good. I hated both novels.

But that was the first time Ellis had ever elicited change within his characters, for none of his protagonists ever experienced any real growth, but that was the point. Don’t get me wrong, growth and change are great for characters and us to experience, but while Ellis moulded Clay from a dullard to a sadist, Welsh tried moulding Sick Boy from a scumbag to a semi-reformed, lovesick puppy. Why is this wrong? Because Sick Boy commits some of the worst offences – but not enough to render him unusable for future novels, unlike Strang and Bruce Robertson – throughout the entire series, and the change feels like a shoddy attempt to suit modern readers when they can easily pick up a previous iteration. It’s also like Welsh is trying to make us forget about the earlier horrors Sick Boy committed.

The main plot of DMT revolves around a hilarious chain of events leading Sick Boy, Euan and Spud to come under threat from a violent pimp over a stolen kidney. It features a decent combination of hilarity and horror, one scene involving Sick Boy being forced to remove Spud’s kidney.

Then, after Sick Boy successfully scams Renton out of hundreds of thousands of pounds, Spud eventually meets his tragic end. Welsh skilfully depicts a great sadness as Sick Boy and Renton attend the funeral, their friendship beyond repair despite longing to patch things up. Afterwards, DMT’s final chapters somewhat reintroduce the Sick Boy we remembered, taking Marianne’s hand in marriage and arrogantly bringing her to a family dinner, despite them all having witnessed her having anal sex with Euan, and demands that they all accept her as part of the family. Seeking to celebrate the engagement, Sick Boy orders an escort for a threesome, but detectives storm in amidst this and demand that he come to the station for questioning. Then comes Sick Boy’s final chapter, the very one that caused me to laugh myself silly and cement him as one of my favourite literary characters.

When they reveal the gruesome murder of Victor Syme, the pimp who orchestrated the organ theft, and that Euan had turned himself in out of guilt over Spud’s kidney, it seems Sick Boy is finally defeated, only he turns the tables on the detectives, revels in an outrageous performance and points out the non-existing holes in the story. Those holes are absolutely true, but they’re so outlandish they don’t sound so. Then Sick Boy cannot decide whether he wants to implicate another associate Mikey Forrester, but decides that Forrester will be stupid enough to implicate himself. Sick Boy is then released. THAT is the Sick Boy I enjoyed reading about.

The chapter, titled Interrogation, stuck with me for days. It was so well written and utterly genius that I had actually never realised just how toned down it was. I’m always one to recognise self censorship. Other times, when I find something genuinely brilliant, it will take me a lot longer to recognise censorship until I’m picking it apart. Interrogation was so spectacular that when my then-twenty-three-year-old self read it, I looked over my first originally intended debut, realised how little I knew and dumped it in a drawer to gather dust. I then searched my notebooks to find something else to work on.

The Long Knives, a sequel to Crime, was a struggle to finish and seemed Welsh was course-correcting yet again with Ray Lennox, as had been done with Begbie and Sick Boy, giving Lennox a tragic backstory mentioned in neither Filth nor Crime and trying to make us forget Lennox’s scummy behaviour in his supporting role in Filth in which he was an emasculated loser who became Detective Inspector because there was no real competition. And even Sick Boy’s cameo in this novel is a total waste. There's also an obvious attempt to morph the literary character from Jamie Bell's goofier depiction in the motion picture version of Filth, which was quite prominent still in Crime, to Dougary Scott's more tonally serious version in Crime the television series.

Lennox is trying to solve the murder of a bigoted Tory MP. Meanwhile, his engagement is failing, and his nephew has gone missing. To deal with all this, Lennox heavily uses alcohol and cocaine. So it bears all the clichés of crime noir without actually turning the genre on its head.

Filth was a novel that contained all the formulaic ideas of crime noir clichés but also presented a giant middle finger to them. Detective Bruce Robertson’s cliché issues were his eczema-riddled scrotum, dwindling mental health, drug and alcohol abuse, gorging on junk food, his missing wife Carole and daughter Stacey, looming Christmas holidays, and a racist murder, which he goes out of his way to avoid solving.

Noir fiction always had central characters that were somehow toxic but were mentally tortured enough to garner some sympathy. And the reason for their cynicism was always revealed over time through some kind of overly dramatic literary device, like a villainous monologue or a woe-stricken one. Filth deconstructs that trope by having that literary device come through absurdism; Bruce winds up eating a dodgy semi-frozen pie from a deli and contracts tapeworms. One of those worms survives his antibiotic treatment and begins to ramble philosophically and eventually details Robertson’s disturbingly tragic (and somewhat absurdly hilarious) upbringing, but what Welsh was also doing was peeking over readers’ shoulders, testing the limits of their moral boundaries each time Robertson did something worse than before. The very clear moment where we know Bruce and we have reached the bottom of the barrel involves a farmer, a prostitute, a camera and a labrador—enough said.

Regarding the murder, however, first, we think his lack of effort towards solving it is just down to laziness, since we see that he can barely muster enough effort to cook a meal for himself or clean his house, then possibly racism. Then, his intent slowly becomes more sinister as we suspect that his missing wife committed the murder and that he’s protecting her. Eventually, we come to learn that Bruce’s eczema, junk food obsession, substance abuse, and lack of effort to solve either the murder or his own mental anguish are all part of the same problem, for in the end, it turns out that the murdered man was already on the brink of dying after a merciless beating from thugs and that Bruce finished him off… while cross-dressing as Carole, who left him.

The novel also takes sharp stabs into the world of Freemasonry, of which Bruce is a member, explaining why he managed to get away with the killing. However, it doesn’t improve his life because he commits suicide regardless.

While The Long Knives wasn't half as daring as that, it doesn't mean it is without value. On the contrary, like DMT, The Long Knives has plenty I applaud. Number one is its anti-establishment themes – something I always support – that were always present in previous novels, but here it’s nearly front-centre with Tory-bashing. While I support that, I don’t feel it’s as clever or daring as it thinks it is since they’re easy targets. At various points in previous novels, even in The Blade Artist, snide observations are made in reference to the overall systemic structures as opposed to one obvious shower of reprehensibles.

Another aspect of The Long Knives that I enjoyed was the theme revolving around transgenderism, a more stomachable way of handling it as opposed to the incessant Americanised screaming MSM will have us believe is reality. Sure, art still has a long way to go in terms of depicting certain areas of society, though my recent viewing of the horror film Talk to Me makes me believe independent art may be on the better track to that than the shite Hollywood and Netflix seem determined to vomit out. Some will argue The Long Knives was too heavy-handed in its approach to LGBTQ+ themes and could have had more/less. But then again, Scorsese cannot watch Goodfellas to this day without fussing over some minor detail in the corner of the screen that nobody will notice.

Welsh mentioned that he used a trans sensitivity reader and some childishly thought that was him falling into the “ultra woke” mindset of our colonial cousins. Those who argue that will also straight-facedly quote a Greek philosopher while not realising that Ancient Greece was full of queer and transgender people. Gallae, anyone? Sensitivity readers/viewers are vital to authentically tackle an especially taboo subject matter with grace. I used one myself and I adore writing dark nihilistic horror; it doesn’t equal apologetic of any sort, and The Long Knives is written in third person, and not the perspective of Bruce Roberston, Roy Strang or any of the others, so there wouldn’t be any excuse for Welsh to write trans people from an ignorant perspective. Though there is one moment where Lennox details the difference between gender and sex, and I nearly wanted to roll into a ball, not because I disagreed with it, but because of its campiness.

In hindsight, it’s hard to know where Welsh is going in terms of daring creativity and it saddens me to think that campy detective thrillers are his way forward, especially when all his original novels bore a fearlessness that proved difficult to replicate. The argument of suiting “modern audiences” goes straight out the window for me, especially when a good portion of these “modern audiences” aren’t even going to read the book/see the film/play the game/listen to the music/watch the show. Is this Welsh’s future? We won’t know for sure until after the Crime trilogy’s conclusion.

The next post will be about one of the worst sequels to one of the greatest pieces of entertainment ever created and how the Irish Fascist Censorship Office disturbingly overstepped serious boundaries for it.