Irvine Welsh, 63, grew up in Muirhouse, north Edinburgh, and lives in Oxfordshire, having spent most of the 2010s in Chicago and Miami. The Long Knives, his 13th novel, is a sequel to 2008’s Crime, which screened last year as a six-part BritBox series with Dougray Scott in the lead role of DI Ray Lennox. In the new book, Lennox is tasked with solving the murder of a Tory MP found castrated in a Leith warehouse. Welsh spoke as shooting was about to begin on its television adaptation; other business in hand included Trainspotting’s forthcoming debut as a West End musical, two separate documentaries about his life (“like buses, you know”), a recently launched record label and getting married for a third time.
Did you always plan to write a sequel to Crime?
Doing the TV show [of the first novel] piqued my curiosity. We were telling the story about Lennox’s family and this thing that happened to him as a kid, and since it was doing well and there was a chance for another season, I wrote about what would happen if he found the guys who abused him. But the novel I wrote then will be coming out next year, because it seemed to leave space for another book in between to develop the family drama and really set up the payoff. I thought if I could get it done in time, the show’s second season could be based on The Long Knives instead and it is. So having not had a book out since 2017, they’re now coming thick and fast because I did nothing in lockdown except write.
