Book Of The Month October, 2009
CrimeIrvine Welsh
Now bereft of both youth and ambition, Detective Inspector Ray Lennox is recovering from a mental breakdown induced by occupational stress and cocaine abuse, and a particularly horrifying child sex murder case back in Edinburgh. On vacation in Florida, his fiancée Trudi is only interested in planning their forthcoming wedding, and a bitter argument sees a deranged Lennox cast adrift in strip-mall Florida. He meets two women in a seedy bar, ending up at their apartment for a coke binge interrupted by two menacing strangers. After the ensuing brawl, Lennox finds himself alone with Tianna, the terrified ten-year-old daughter of one of the women, and a sheet of instructions that make him responsible for her immediate safety. Lennox takes her across the state to an exclusive marina on the Gulf of Mexico, and quickly suspects that he has stumbled into a hornet s nest: a gang of organized paedophiles, every bit as threatening as the monster that haunted him back in Edinburgh. His priority is to protect the abused girl, but can the edgy Lennox trust his own instincts? And can he negotiate her inappropriate sexuality, as well as his own mental fragility, while still trying to get to grips with the Edinburgh murder and the emotions it unleashes in him? A novel about the corruption and abuse of the human soul and the possibilities of redemption, Crime is a thrilling journey into the bright glamour of the Sunshine State and a seething underworld of utter darkness.
What We Think
This month sees the launch of Irvine Welsh’s Crime in paperback and enhanced ebook featuring three exclusive movies available for your iPhone. Read below about Irvine’s inspiration for the book or watch the video:
“I was interested in doing a thriller, but more an existential thriller, rather than a police procedural thriller. I wanted to get a character who was not trying to solve a mystery or a crime as such, but was trying to work through their own internal processes, the things that have been messing up their life that they’ve repressed. I thought about the character Lennox, who was a minor character in one of my previous books, Filth. He just seemed to me to be a guy of secrets in that book. I found I wanted to know more about him. I thought about what would be the secret he could be repressing. I read somewhere that a lot of people who have been sexually abused as kids go in to work with sex offenders, either in policing or social work. They’re always driven to squaring this thing. I thought that something like that is what Lennox could have got involved in for these reasons.”