Irvine Welsh

Irvine Welsh is of course the author behind the legendary Trainspotting (1993). Welsh’s brilliant debut novel was famously adapted by Danny Boyle into an equally iconic film — complete with breakthrough performances by Ewan McGregor and others, an electrifying soundtrack (Born Slippy!), and a notorious party at the Cannes Film Festival.

The marginal figures who took centre stage in his debut have continued to populate his later work: drug addicts, pimps, alcoholics, people living on the fringes of society. Another hallmark is their use of rich Scottish slang. These figures also return in his new novel Crime, although this time Welsh shows a more overtly engaged side.

After a traumatic handling of a crime and a subsequent burnout, the Scottish detective Ray Lennox escapes with his girlfriend Trudi to Florida. Getting married, recovering, and staying off drugs are now his main goals for the future. But while Trudi cannot stop talking about their upcoming wedding, he drifts increasingly depressed through the bars and clubs of downtown Miami. When two women offer him sex and cocaine, he does not hesitate. In their apartment he encounters a ten-year-old girl who is at risk of becoming the victim of a paedophile network. Lennox takes responsibility for her, but soon discovers that the demons that nearly destroyed him in Edinburgh have followed him here as well.

Read the first chapter: click here (PDF)

Irvine Welsh will be interviewed during BorderKitchen by Ronald Rovers (VPRO Gids, Filmkrant).

Location: Theater aan het Spui, Spui 187, The Hague. Start time: 8:00 PM.

Tickets (€7.50) can be reserved at Theater aan het Spui:

Phone: (070) 346 52 72
Email: kassa@theateraanhetspui.nl
www.theateraanhetspui.nl

“Fortunately, the endless Scottish dialogue and sports chatter have remained — oddly enough strong points of Welsh’s work — but in the tighter tone of Crime, the darker psychological insights come through even better than in earlier novels.” – NRC Handelsblad

Crime is translated into Dutch by Ton Heuvelmans.