A good story hiding behind horrible, painful punctuation. Irvine - please use speech-marks to indicate the beginning and end of speech please! It would make it 100% easier to read, if you were to do so.Also make sure that you're up on the latest Scottish slang. ( )

Excellent read, and possibly the most accessible Irvine Welsh I have read. a copper (who worked with Robbo in Welsh's previous novel "Flilth") goes to Miami on holiday and comes up against a paedophile ring. Disturbing, but thrilling and will have you very involved by the end. ( )

The strange thing about Irvine Welsh is that, against the odds, Trainspotting made an excellent film and no doubt, in the right hands, his latest book would make an even better one since it has a fairly straightforward story line, a minimum of incomprehensible brogue and a reasonably upbeat conclusion.

My advice to all except die hard Welsh fans is: Wait for the Movie. Although it is an improvement on Porno, the last of his books I read, Crime is little more than an average literary novel with a strong plot.

The story begins with Detective Inspector Ray Lennox [whom regular readers will remember from Filth] flying to Miami Beach with his fiancé Trudi for a holiday, during which they will make wedding plans and attempt to resuscitate their moribund sex life.

As the story unfolds it becomes clear that Lennox, who is recovering from a mental breakdown, is conflicted about the upcoming marriage and, having recently and reluctantly given up cocaine, has started to abuse alcohol instead.

Impatient, bad tempered and jittery, longing for a line of coke and hitting the booze with reckless abandon, it is only a matter of time before he snaps and attacks Trudi, whose attempts to rehabilitate him he resents.

“And it hits him, in her look and tone, just how desperate he really is. He wants to say ‘I’m dying, help me, please’, but it comes out in a monotone shrug as, - I’m just doing what I want to on a holiday. If you don’t like it, fuck off. “

After Trudi departs in outraged distress, Ray starts trawling seedy bars until he is picked up by two women, accompanies them home, and the three of them embark on a cocaine binge which Ray halts immediately when he realizes there is a young girl in the flat, the 10-year-old daughter of the more desperate of his companions.

As the story continues, the reader learns Ray’s breakdown was precipitated by a case he was assigned involving the abduction, rape, torture and murder of a little girl: although he caught the killer, it was too late to prevent the child’s death.

He joined the police specifically to get into the serious crimes unit and concentrate on the monsters – ‘nonces’ he calls them – who prey on children. Driven on the job, his personal life suffered, hence the self-medication with cocaine and alcohol.

Eventually the reason for Ray’s crusade against child sex offenders [I mean adults who assault children, not children who commit sexual offences] is revealed: he and his best friend Les were assaulted by three paedophiles when they were 12. Ray was forced to fellate one but still got off lightly in comparison to Les who was anally raped twice.

Over twenty years later, Les has made his peace with what happened, concentrating on his family and the present but Ray is haunted and consumed by the episode.

When he finds himself plunged into the middle of a child sex ring in Florida, he takes it very personally, making himself responsible for Tianna, the victim, going on the run with her and, having discovered a senior member of the syndicate is a police officer, able to trust nobody.

Although Welsh now lives in Dublin, his characters remain resolutely Scottish: he approaches Florida as a tourist and his descriptions, while detailed and homey, are far from enticing.

Bloodthirsty marauding alligators and mosquitoes, huge ethnic and geographical class distinctions, monolithic communal blocks which, despite interior luxury and spaciousness, are eyesores on the exterior, and a lifestyle that accepts and even encourages conspicuous consumption on the part of the lucky few.

Sinister child sex syndicates, cruel and ruthless manipulation of needy single mothers and their desperately-seeking-a-daddy daughters, psychological torture and a network with corrupt cancerous branches everywhere, the suppositions behind Welsh’s Crime are completely compelling.

On the downside, this author continues to take liberties with punctuation and irritates with his frequent and entirely unnecessary use of dialect: “Fucking seek ay they things” – what does that mean, exactly? “– Ah’m no gaunny say nowt -” the brogue and the use of dashes rather than inverted commas is a stylistic affectation which can get tedious.

A story of dark desires, aberrant sexuality, alternative lifestyles and a fundamentally decent man battling the demons that possess him and struggling to recognize and embrace the good in his life, Crime is the story of Everyman. ( )

http://its-criminal.blogspot.com/2008... ( )