Dead Men's Trousers
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4.5 • 26 Ratings
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- $14.99
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
The International Bestseller from the author The New York Times called "blisteringly funny" — it's the wild and wooly crew from Trainspotting back for one last adventure
You don't need to have seen the blockbuster movie—nor read the earlier mega-bestselling books—to get what's going on in Dead Men's Trousers: Four no-longer-young men who constantly think back to their bawdy, drug-filled youth together on the streets of Edinburgh, decide they want to join forces for one last caper.
Careful what you wish for...
"Manages a sort of ragged glory, a life-affirming comic energy . . .
A whooping last hurrah for the Trainspotting gang."
—The Guardian
"Crackles with idiomatic energy and brio." —Publishers Weekly
Mark Renton is finally a success. He now makes significant money managing DJs, but the constant travel, airport lounges, soulless hotel rooms, and broken relationships have left him dissatisfied with life.
Then he runs into his old partner in crime, Frank Begbie, from whom he'd been hiding for years. But the psychotic Begbie appears to have reinvented himself as a celebrated artist in Los Angeles, and doesn't seem interested in revenge.
Meanwhile, back in Edinburgh, Sick Boy and Spud are intrigued to learn that their old friends are back in town, and concoct a new scheme for them all . . .
Which is when things start to go horribly wrong. The four men, driven by their personal histories and addictions, circle each other, confused, angry, and desperate. One of these four will not survive . . . Which one is wearing Dead Men's Trousers?
Fast and furious, scabrously funny, and weirdly moving, this is a spectacular return of the crew from Trainspotting.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
More than 25 years after they first appeared in Trainspotting, all four of Welsh's hard-living Scottish friends reunite in Edinburgh, roped into an appropriately bizarre and macabre organ harvesting caper. Told from the perspectives of the four protagonists, the novel rolls slowly in the first half, updating their individual biographies separately readers new to Welsh's world need not be apprehensive and setting up the brisker, and inevitably bollixed, execution of the theft plot. Two of these former reprobate mates have successfully escaped their pasts. Renton travels the globe as a music manager. Begbie, who runs into Renton on a plane in the opening chapter, is a successful artist living in California. Spud, whose narrative is most steeped in a slangy Scottish dialect, still lives on the edge and instigates the kidney-napping caper. Sick Boy, like Spud, is still in Edinburgh, and crashing with his sister, Carlotta, who screamingly blames him for the degeneration of her son, Ross, and husband, Euan, apparently on a debauched trip to Thailand. When the four finally get together, much comic mileage is wrung in rehashing old grievances. Not surprisingly, the crime unfolds like a Keystone Kops version of Ocean's 11, but with an irrevocable final result. Welsh's entire oeuvre crackles with idiomatic energy and brio, and this rollicking novel is no different.
Customer Reviews
Excellent
I’ve had these characters kicking around in my conscious and subconscious mind for 25 years since I first met them reading Trainspotting and then awaited them in every other novel Mr. Welsh has released. Sometimes they were back and sometimes I got to meet other wonderful characters. Dead Man’s Trousers is fantastic. The Leith heads have aged along with me but feel like old friends. We all still have our bad habits and it was fun to relish in them along with the bams. This is a great book.