So evocative of people and place was Irvine Welsh’s searing literary debut, so influential are both the novel itself and the film adaptations it spawned, that it’s hard sometimes to see the Trainspotting author as anything other than the chronicler-in-chief of urban Scottish life. Or at least life as it is lived in postcodes beginning EH.

The growing body of associated novels adds to the notion. Alongside his stand-alone works, Welsh has amplified and expanded on the lives of those unforgettable Trainspotting characters through a series of prequels and sequels. Porno, The Blade Artist and Skagboys are three, but there are others.

But for a decade and a half now – longer if you include the 1998 novel Filth – Welsh has been ploughing a parallel furrow as a writer of crime fiction. His, though, is of a typically Welshian sort.

“I’m kind of an imposter,” he admits when we talk. “I don’t really know anything about crime fiction. I wrote a book called Crime and it was a bit of a joke, really. It’s ironic. I saw it an existential thriller rather than a kind of police procedural or a crime book.”

Crime, published in 2008, centres on Edinburgh police officer Ray Lennox, a minor character in Filth. The novel drops Lennox into Miami where he is seeking to decompress in the aftermath of a traumatic case involving a child killer. Instead, he finds a paedophile ring. Welsh returned to his troubled anti-hero in 2022’s The Long Knives, which opens with a Tory MP being brutally castrated by a serial killer who targets sexual abusers.

Ironic joke or not, Welsh’s Ray Lennox novels captured the attention of actor Dougray Scott and streaming platform Britbox, who teamed up with Welsh to adapt the first two outings for the small screen. Series one aired in 2021 and won Scott an International Emmy for his performance as Lennox. Series two was broadcast last year and among the stellar supporting cast were Jamie Sives, Derek Riddell, Laura Fraser, Ellie Haddington, John Simm and Ken Stott, best known for playing another Scottish detective, John Rebus.

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Last month Welsh published the third and (probably) final instalment in what has inevitably come to be known as the Crime trilogy. It’s called Resolution, an apt title in more ways than one.

Lennox has now finally left the Edinburgh constabulary and relocated to the trendy Kemptown area of Brighton, about as far from his old stomping ground as you can go without getting your feet wet. There he spars (and more) with new girlfriend Carmel, an academic, and flogs security systems to care homes and anyone else who needs alarms linked to keypads. Naturally, however, the capital is never far away. Neither is its assorted ne’er-do-wells, some of whom carry warrant cards. And there’s no escaping the traumatic experiences which lie in Lennox’s past and which drive Resolution’s plot.

 “I never saw him as a cop,” Welsh says. “I just saw him as this avenging angel-type guy, who’d been a victim of abuse and who had this mad, Calvinistic, vengeful, wrathful spirit. This is the resolution of his quest to avenge the abuse he suffered as a child.

“That’s what it’s about. It’s about vengeance and the consequences of being obsessed with revenge – but also about the consequences of not taking revenge. Of feeling as if you’re weak and powerless and a pushover and internalising that kind of depression. And he has oscillated between the two and seems to have got over it – until the guy he has been hunting seems to fall into his lap.”

Any more information would spoil the plot.

Welsh and I meet about midway between Easter Road stadium, home of his beloved Hibernian FC, and the flat he keeps in the New Town. Each represents two very different points on Edinburgh’s social map, arguably as far apart today as they have ever been.

But to demonstrate that this is also a city in constant flux, we’re talking in what used to be a bank serving the citizenry but is now a bookshop of the quirky, Instagrammable variety – think ceiling-high wooden shelves (with ladders!) and as much literary esoterica as you could, well, throw a book at. 

It’s a sunny summer afternoon and from our upstairs corner table we have a grand view down a rapidly gentrifying Leith Walk peopled by tourists and hipsters. Inevitably, conversation turns to the city and to the changes it is undergoing. Welsh, through Lennox, describes Edinburgh at one point as a “theatre of cowardice” which has failed to “embrace its destiny as a European capital”. What does he mean?

“In a lot of ways this place is like a mausoleum and it has been for a while,” he answers. “You see all these things that are set up for governance, for this to be an independent place that governs itself and it didn’t take that opportunity. And now we’re out of Europe and at the arse end of an inexorably declining Britain.

(Image: Resolution)

“I’ve just come back from Dublin, and Edinburgh should be as vibrant as that. It’s not. Apart from the weekends, it’s pretty much dead outside of the Festival … We’re kind of stuck as this sleepy little backwater, a kind of agreeable little provincial town north of England that’s got its own parliament which is a sort of glorified Strathclyde regional council.”

It’s little surprise, then, that after stints living in the cultural and social melting pots of Chicago and Miami, Welsh spends much of his time in London, where West Ham is his team (he’s a season ticket holder) and Sir Keir Starmer his MP (and no, he didn’t vote for him) His area of that city is changing too, though: he laughs as he tells me that the dingy Kentish Town boozer where he used to buy speed as a punk in the late 1970s is now a Michelin-starred restaurant.

But such is the 65-year-old’s abiding interest in his surroundings and the characters who people it, either milieu could be the setting for one of his trademark tales of low-lives, hypocrites, grotesques and radges. Something typically Welshian, in other words. As for that term, what does the man himself understand by it?

“I don’t know,” he says with a wry chuckle. “It’s bizarre to have a thing like that, to be thought of in that way. But I’ve never paid much attention to that kind of thing because when you do anything, a book or a TV show or a film, it’s an act of giving it away, basically. It’s not really your business what other people think of you. You have to go on, and I’m always focused on the next thing.”

 

Resolution is out now (Jonathan Cape, £20). Irvine Welsh is at the Edinburgh International Book Festival on August 23