In the afterword, Irvine Welsh thanks his screenwriting partner for “providing me with the space to complete these stories, at a period when demands on our time were particularly high”. It sheds a curious light on literary life at the upper end of the success scale, where the writer is so busy being successful that he can hardly get any writing done.

Still, Welsh now presents his eager public with four new short stories and a 190-page novella. All of them play around with story forms and the reader’s expectations, which makes them difficult to discuss without giving away the endings. In Rattlesnakes, Welsh sets up a mock horror-film scenario. Three druggy friends, coming back from the Burning Man festival in Nevada (Glastonbury without the mud), manage to wreck their 4x4 on a remote desert highway. They cannot, of course, get a mobile signal to call for help. They pitch their tent and bed down for the night, but one of them is bitten by a rattlesnake. Considering where the bite is, he’d rather the girl of the party sucked the poison out, but she refuses, so the other bloke has to do it. Oddly, they fail to hear a truck approaching, and are surprised when an armed and homophobic Mexican psychopath steps in at an awkward moment. Ah, but does he shoot them with his .38, or only with the girl’s camera phone, which can send the pictures to all their friends at the stroke of a key?

The title story – and what an excellent title – hinges on the old gag about actors rehearsing their lines. Mickey, an expat English bar owner in the Canaries, thinks he has overheard a couple of gangsters planning a hit, but he hasn’t. The Scottish author lays on Mickey’s cockney a bit thick, with rhyming slang, boxing metaphors and lines such as “Think what Roger Moore or Kenneth More or Bobby Moore would do in this situ”, but the voice is amusing, as is the subplot about a loopy Greek girl and her reluctant boyfriend. “He’s been made a proper Herbert. Herbertitis A, I would say.”

In The DOGS of Lincoln Park (the acronym stands for Desperate Obsessive Girl Snobs), a Chicago It Girl does have an actual dog – until it vanishes. She suspects her neighbour, an enigmatic Korean chef who collects samurai swords. Then the It Girl vanishes, too. The chef then serves her girlfriends an unusual meat dish and invites them into his kitchen for a “surprise”, picking up “a huge filleting knife” as he follows them in . . . Again the reader is prompted by the use of horror-film clichés, and yet again there is comic misdirection going on.

The novella, The Kingdom of Fife, has characters that tend towards stock types as ever, but the self-conscious film formulas give way to an episodic comedy of young love in Cowdenbeath. Or is this an 18-certificate Bill Forsyth film, as skint former jockey Jason King gets off with posh bird Jenni Cahill, “skilled in snobby St Andrews”? (“Skilled” means schooled.) We assume that young Jason does not know why his name is funny to us oldies, but it turns out he does know, or sort of knows. “Depertment S . . . the ‘S’ bein fir Shaggin!” Curious. He remembers a television show from 10 years before he was born, but remains unaware that the stylish crimebusting hero was so notably camp. Oh, well.

Another dog goes missing in daft circumstances, Jenni’s snobby best friend is brought down a peg, a nasty yob gets a comedy comeuppance (with phone photos to prove it) and most of the good characters, although not all, live happily ever after. Jason’s dialect narration is less impenetrable than it seems at first sight, quite engaging really. And, here as throughout, Welsh proves a farceur of some distinction.

IF YOU LIKED SCHOOL, YOU'LL LOVE WORK by Irvine Welsh
Cape £11.99 pp391
Buy the book here at the offer price of £10.79 (inc p&p)

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