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Crime is not exactly a rare presence on television screens. The exploits of various lawbreakers, and even more prevalently, those tasked with apprehending them, are pretty much at saturation point in TV. It’s possible it’s been ever thus. As such, if a crime drama really wants to stand out from the crowd, it really has to bring something different to the table.
Enter Irvine Welsh, a man who could never be accused of slavish trend-following, and a show which doesn’t just deal with crime, but boldly takes the word as its title: based on his 2008 novel, Crime signposts immediately that here is a show that drills down to the bones of its subject matter. In fact, Crime is about a lot more than just crime, depending on how you want to define the word.
Dougray Scott and Joanna Vanderham (centre) lead the cast of Crime.Credit: Britbox
“It’s a psychological thriller rather than a police procedural,” says Welsh. “And the problem is that in Britain, the mainstream TV audience is very much a traditional kind of audience. So we thought start off as a police procedural and move it into the existential thriller. Start off with The Bill and move on to True Detective, was my mantra. Because I was far more interested in that than in Lennox solving the mystery.”
Lennox is Detective Inspector Ray Lennox, the tortured soul who in series one of Crime was brought to breaking point hunting a serial killer, a case that opened up his own deep-seated psychological wounds. In series two Lennox is back, apparently recovered from his breakdown, but still carrying the traumas of his past, still emotionally fragile even as he pursues justice with obsessive zeal.
“He’s messed up,” acknowledges Dougray Scott, who plays Lennox. “It was a character that really required an awful lot of energy and emotional investment. All he wants is to find these guys who abused him as a child, and he’s used the police force as a means to try and achieve that goal. He’s obsessed with that. In the meantime, he connects with the wrongs that have been done to others, especially kids who have been abused. He dances to his own tune and he’ll break the rules in order to get what he wants. But he’s constantly on the move, because I think he feels if he stops moving, like a shark, he’ll run out of oxygen and die.”
Of course, the cop who won’t play by the rules is an old cop-show trope, but Lennox is not so easily placed into a box. Crime much less about exalting the archetype of the heroic maverick than it is about exploring the psyche of a good man whose inner pain distorts his perspective more than he’d like to admit.
Dougray Scott and Irvine Welsh at the Scottish premiere of their series Crime.Credit: Getty Images
There are also surprises to be found in Lennox’s character, as seen in series two, when in an unexpected turn from a man who could be seen as a classic old-school copper, the detective shows staunch loyalty and compassion to his former police partner, a trans woman.
“I really loved that story,” says Scott. “I thought that was really cool and interesting and sort of relevant. It’s an interesting side being shown to Ray who, from the background he came from, I guess may not have been someone who’s expected to be as accepting as he is. But he’s a compassionate person, he’s empathetic to a fault, it’s what makes him a great cop but also causes some pain.”
Crime, the novel, was set in Miami, in the aftermath of events depicted in the TV series. In adapting it for television, Welsh, one of the world’s most acclaimed modern novelists, had to adapt to working in a different way. “You have to think in a much different way,” he muses.
‘The downside of [working for TV] is it’s like having a proper job, which is kind of what you become a writer to get away from.’
“If you’re writing a novel, you’re basically God. With TV, everyone’s got a say, it’s a very collaborative thing, it’s like you have the tea boy with a red pen saying change this, change that. You have to see it in a completely different way. You’re not writing something, you’re writing a kind of plan to get something made. So you have to see yourself in a completely different relationship to the material. The downside of it is it’s like having a proper job, which is kind of what you become a writer to get away from. The good side is you get to work with people and it’s quite a nourishing process really.”
Central to Crime is the collaboration between Welsh and Scott, whose friendship goes back decades. “We see the world very similarly,” says Scott. “We’ve got a lot in common and we enjoy spending time with each other. We’ve both got the same football team, that gives us a lot of pain.”
“Dougray is a great guy to work with,” Welsh enthuses, “because he’s absolutely relentless. We wouldn’t have got Crime made without him. The two of us together have forged quite a path.”
In forging that path, Welsh and Scott have added to the wealth of Scottish voices making a mark on TV recently, from Outlander to Shetland to Karen Pirie and more. For Scott, who has experienced the life of a Hollywood star with a resume that includes Mission: Impossible 2 and Desperate Housewives, bringing it all back home was a key motivation with Crime, on which he is also executive producer.
“I just felt at this stage of my career, I wanted to commit to telling stories from my own country, because I know it better than any other country. And I’ve spent my career working in other countries pretending to be other people, which is great, it’s part of my job and I’ll still do that. But I had this burning desire to connect to Scotland in a way I hadn’t quite done before.”
Welsh’s work, led by novels like Trainspotting, Filth, and of course Crime, has always been distinctively Scottish. “(Scotland) has always punched above its weight artistically,” he observes. There’s more writers and actors and artists in general per square mile than probably anywhere. There’s something about small countries, I think, that because they don’t have a big political voice on the bigger stage, they really invest in the arts. The arts are the way they make their mark in the world.”
Crime is on Britbox now.
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