A gripping tale from the dark side
CRIME By Irvine Welsh (Vintage, €26.40)
Saturday June 28 2008
It is to Irvine Welsh's eternal credit that he remains one of the most divisive writers this side of Chuck Palahniuk.
To some, his eager enthusiasm for the darker things in life -- drugs, weird sex and even weirder violence -- make him little more than a talented smut peddler; someone who gives his readers a vicarious thrill, allowing them to become short-term tourists in other people's misery.
Others, however, admire the fact that he doesn't flinch in his writings and they laud his often incomprehensible use of vernacular speech, treating the traditional rules of grammar and diction with the same disregard as the characters he writes about. That's what I've often found most irritating about him but, in fairness, if Cormac McCarthy can do it, why not Welsh?
He sticks to a more conventional style in Crime, a shudderingly bleak account of Detective Inspector Ray Lennox, a spent man, drowning, rather than waving, following the devastating effects of a serious coke habit and his inability to get his head around a horrific child murder, which he had to investigate.
Retiring to Florida to recharge his batteries with his wedding-obsessed fiancée, Lennox falls spectacularly off the wagon and finds himself once more being dragged into a morass of paedophilia and child murder.
Lennox slips easily into the grand old tradition of an inherently good cop, ravaged and eroded by the human detritus he is forced to deal with. But Welsh is too good a writer to make that mistake. Anyone who can write a thriller about paedophilia and child abuse without coming across as a cut- rate version of the brilliant Andrew Vachss deserves credit.
Welsh may have been coasting in some of his previous works, but this stands alone not just as a good read, but also as a good introduction to the man's work.
Highly recommended.
- IAN O'DOHERTY
