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Something has happened to Irvine Welsh.

His head's still shaved, his Edinburgh accent still occasionally slips into incomprehensibility, and he still has the general bearing of a thuggish punk in the Scottish music scene of the 1970s. But his paunch is noticeable now, tightening what would otherwise be a loose-fitting T-shirt, and that tattoo on his left forearm has faded into skin that has stayed stubbornly white, despite the fact that the bestselling author of Trainspotting and Porno now winters with his young, American, second wife in Miami Beach.

And then there's his latest book. Though he calls it an existential thriller, Crime is more the sort of book that would make it onto Oprah's shortlist, with its childhood sexual abuse; its adults looking to rescue children, only to find themselves the ones in need of rescuing; and the children, with their hard-won wisdom, the only ones who can help.

Oprah would probably end up rejecting it for its enthusiastic use of various four-letter words and British Isles lingo (glaikit, dreich, stoat-the-baw), but she'd be just as likely to leave it on Stedman's night table for its lessons on how to take manly hurt and deal with it like a woman.

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“Most of my books are about how people [expletive] up,” Welsh said during an interview in Toronto recently. “This one is different; it's about how people come together to heal.”

That certainly is different for Welsh. There's not a toilet dive or talking tapeworm in all 341 pages of Crime. Fans of Sick Boy may be left scratching their scabs.

Mention middle age, or suggest this 50-year-old author's entering a new, possibly softer-edged phase of his writing, and he'll accuse you of being simplistic. “I do it myself with writers or musicians, saying this is their glam-rock period, this is the cocaine period, this is the E-minor period. But I don't think it actually works in that way,” he says of artistic creation. But he does think something is going on with Crime, something that hadn't affected his previous work. He blames the Irish priests.

Welsh has been living in Dublin for the past few years, and the constant stories of priests and altar boys, of years-old offences coming to light in lawsuit after lawsuit, left him so shaken that he was willing in his latest book to chance a potentially clichéd metaphor to drive his point home.

“It's become a cheap device that writers use, to compare something horrible that happens to the Holocaust,” he says, referring to the role that the odd but moving Miami Beach Holocaust Memorial plays in the book. “But I think this actually does stand up. Because much of it can happen in silence to so many people over the years, on such a scale over the years. If the experience of Ireland is at all typical – and there's nothing to say that it's entirely atypical – then the number of people who have been directly affected by it since the First World War, anyway, must be absolutely massive, on a par almost with the numbers of children who perished in the Holocaust.”

Welsh spoke to victims of abuse, and was sufficiently moved by their stories, by what he saw as their extraordinary resilience, to dispense with what he now acknowledges as the experimentalism of his earlier work, in order to deal with the subject.

“I kind of thought, because it's quite a serious subject, I didn't think the format of it, the structure should be too, kinda, gamesy,” he says. “What got me about talking to people who'd survived sexual abuse was that it's messed people up really badly, but they're so resilient, they're much more resilient, and I think: I would never be able to survive, I'd jump off a tower block in this situation.”

In fact, he was overcome twice by his subject matter, forcing him to stop writing for several months – once, after talking to former victims, and feeling cheap trying to approximate their emotions; and again when Madeleine McCann was abducted last year in Portugal and he stopped writing for half a year.

“It just seemed frivolous and stupid,” he says. “You're writing about something when people are experiencing this real pain and terror. I just felt cheap and hollow writing about it. I shouldn't have, of course. That's the whole purpose of writing, to tackle that kind of difficult thing, to tackle a challenging area and invest it with that kind of power and integrity. But at the time, I just needed a break.”

For a man responsible for writing a passage in Trainspotting that became one of the most disturbing dead-baby scenes in recent cinema, the effect is not to be written off as the blushing reaction of a wilting Scottish daffodil.

One of the most powerful aspects of Crime is how, in its structure and its restraint, in its slow, seeping treatment of its hot, uncomfortable, unfamiliar surroundings, the by-now common subject of pedophilia so utterly floored such a stalwart writer.

Set largely in Florida, with flashbacks to Edinburgh written in an intentionally distancing, even confusing, second-person narrative, Crime is a road-trip revenge story, but without the sort of gunpowder payoff that might entice a latter-day Charles Bronson to pick up the rights. Its protagonist is Ray Lennox, an Edinburgh policeman whom Welsh fans will remember as a character from his second-most successful novel.

“He was very enigmatic in Filth. He was a guy who had secrets, you didn't know much about him, why was he so ambitious. He had no reason to get to the top, to be such an underhanded guy,” says Welsh, who brought back his Trainspotting star Sick Boy in a previous work, and is using two characters from Glue in his next book. “I remember putting a note down that it was possible he'd been abused when he was younger; he seemed to have these secrets. He also seemed to be driven by something, but it wasn't obvious what it was.”

Though Welsh's next book, due in 2009, is also set in Florida, the fact that it centres on the winter-music festival implies we might be getting back to the old, wonky Welsh. Another boon for classic Welsh fans, for whom his move to Dublin must have bordered on the traitorous, is that he's planning to leave Ireland.

“I've really enjoyed it, but there is an issue there. I've started reading the Irish Times instead of the British newspapers, and watching RTE [Ireland's national TV network] instead of the British channels,” he says, with what on a less pugilistic face might be called a moue. “Scotland and Ireland are quite culturally close, so it's easy to get a little … ”

He pauses, not interested in getting into the finer points of intra-Gaelic differentiation. “I think I'm going to move early next year.”

Special to The Globe and Mail