Bonnyrigg author Colin Burnett drew comparisons to James Kelman and Irvine Welsh for his debut short story collection, A Working Class State Of Mind, written in east coast Scots. His tales of underdogs, duped and defeated by life, often shared a theme: ‘Life’s jist yin big fuckin joke oan gadgies like us,’ he wrote, echoing the on-point writings of Glaswegian rapper and activist Darren McGarvey in Poverty Safari. 

Burnett returns with the sequel Who’s Aldo?, which reads a bit like The Sopranos set in Leith’s Newkirkgate Shopping Centre. Aldo is a 34-year old, drug-dealing hardman who has done time in Saughton Prison and remains proud of his ‘reputation fur extreme violence’. But he’s trying to clean up his act. And love is in the air. We follow him on various escapades; scamming a benefits assessment, stepping in when bullies rough up a kid, training down the boxing gym, clowning around at Mortonhall Crematorium. The love of Aldo’s life is a wee staffy named Bruce, although a comedy passage describing his absolute mortification at his dog’s flight rather than fight response works as a good caricature of Aldo’s toxic masculinity.

Among the bampottery and Aldo’s fantasy of doing a jobby on the pitch at Tynecastle, there’s real sympathy and solidarity with Scotland’s most deprived and vulnerable. Burnett believes not only that working-class voices should be heard, they should be respected and lauded. Within his farcical tales of chancers and wideos, details of the routine indignities and injustices suffered by the proletariat are crushingly well observed, time and again. From the ‘restless natives still trapped in the NHS’s cutbacks’ as they wait anxiously in health appointment purgatory, to those shoplifting to eat or reoffending for three square meals a day, Burnett doesn’t sugarcoat his views on the horrors of Broken Britain and Tory legacies. 

Aldo’s descriptions of women usually reveal an everyday misogyny that matches his old-fashioned, nasty gangster view on the world. The macho banter makes our anti-hero pretty unlikeable, but then a woke schoolgirl holds a mirror up to Aldo’s 1950s sexism. When she switches him on to things like bodily autonomy and the right for her to wear what she likes without fear of being hassled, he’s all ears and we start seeing this nutter in a totally different light (a bit like when Dr Melfi finds herself being charmed by psychopath Tony Soprano). Can Aldo see the error of some of his knuckle-dragging ways and evolve into not-quite a pillar of the community, but at least someone trying to use his powers for good? Answering that question, Burnett delivers quality male soap opera with a heavy Leith twang.

Colin Burnett: Who’s Aldo? is published by Tippermuir Books on Thursday 30 November.