The last time we saw DI Ray Lennox, the tortured Edinburgh cop played by Dougray Scott in Irvine Welsh’s Crime , he had suffered a complete mental collapse. The trauma of childhood abuse had resurfaced with a vengeance while interrogating the paedophile serial killer played by John Simm , and Lennox had been put on sick leave. Series two of the crime drama (streaming on ITVX since last September and now showing twice weekly on ITV1) found Lennox returning to work.
He assured his boss, Bob Toal (Ken Stott), and his therapist, Sally Hart (Laura Fraser), that he was absolutely fine and raring to get back to policing. Neither seemed convinced, and those of us familiar with the almost laughably overwrought Lennox will have shared their scepticism. Scott’s volcanic performance was the most compelling reason to have watched that earlier series.
Fans of Welsh’s more acerbic works may have been disappointed by this mostly rather more restrained police procedural, but enough of the author’s voice poked through the more conventional cop show narrative. Lennox even told himself that “we must opt to live” – surely a self-reference to Renton’s famous “choose life” comment in Trainspotting . The episode began with a corpse dressed in a naval uniform hanging from the staircase in a grand-looking house.
We then fast-forward 10 years to a gruesome murder in an Edinburgh hotel room. Also presumably connected to these two deaths was a third storyline involving a former police.