Review | Trainspotting author back to doing what he does best

Dead Men’s Trousers
by Irvine Welsh
Jonathan Cape

“The dog ate it” has never been a smart excuse for failing to deliver an assignment. In Dead Men’s Trousers – the new novel from Irvine Welsh, and which regroups the heroin-addled Scottish reprobates from his gritty, mega-selling debut Trainspotting (1993) – core character Spud’s failure to meet his deadline results in sex-tape blackmail, a grisly form of drug smuggling, YouTube-assisted DIY surgery and death for one of the gang.

It would be wrong to call Dead Men’s Trousers the second Trainspotting sequel, after 2002’s Porno. Welsh’s output has long had a “shared universe” aspect, with Renton, Sick Boy, Spud and Begbie variously starring or making cameo appear­ances in other novels and short-story collections, including The Acid House (1994), Marabou Stork Nightmares (1995), Ecstasy (1996), Filth (1998) and Glue (2001). Dead Men’s Trousers could instead be seen as an extrapolation of The Blade Artist (2016), Welsh’s zesty but far-fetched thriller in which psychotic Begbie has reinvented himself as Jim Francis, a successful artist now resident in sunny Santa Barbara, California. The new, improved Begbie has a beautiful wife, darling daughters and a penchant for Pilates, but his darker side still lurks beneath the perma-tan.

Dead Men’s Trousers covers a year, kicking off in the summer of 2015. Originally from the mean streets of the Edinburgh dockland neighbourhood of Leith, the “boys”, now in their early 50s, are scattered to the winds. But, as the old saying goes: no matter where you run, there you are.

Renton, who ripped off Begbie and his other pals for the proceeds of a drug deal at the end of Trainspotting, to escape his shiftless life of petty crime and self-pity (and occasionally injecting smack into his penis), is now living between Amsterdam and Los Angeles (just down Highway 101 from Santa Barbara).