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Books : Crime, Thrillers & Mystery : Authors, A-Z : B : Brookmyre, Christopher
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Of all writers practising what might loosely be called crime fiction today, Christopher Brookmyre is the one who lends himself least easily to categorisation. There are those eccentric titles, for a start: such as the latest one: A Tale Etched in Blood and Hard Black Pencil. This unwieldy title (as often before) gives an indication of the sardonic quality of his writing, and in that, Brookmyre is reminiscent of his great American colleague, Carl Hiaasen. Like Hiaasen, too, Brookmyre favours eccentric and outrageous plots, but there is always a strong grounding in reality, which gives the humour a decidedly bitter edge.Internet contact between ex-school friends these days leads to some disturbing encounters, and Brookmyre's version of the scenario is typically murderous. Brookmyre is interested in whether or not the index to future of violent behaviour might be discerned in the school playground. DS Karen Gillespie is bemused by a cack-handed attempt at burning a pair of bodies; this takes place outside Glasgow (in fact, in the area in which she grew up). And in a nearby lodge, strange attempts have been made to clean up what appears to be the same crime, but (as a pathologist points out), everything here is handled as maladroitly as the murder. Two suspects appear, but when Karen discovers that they were at primary school together (along with one of the murder victims), things begin to look like a grisly version of Friends Reunited.
Brookmyre readers will know exactly what to expect from this scenario, and they won't be disappointed. If the level of invention is not as delirious as in previous books, Karen Gillespie is as quirkily characterised as ever.
--Barry Forshaw
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Christopher Brookmyre's One Fine Day in the Middle of the Night is a lethal farce in which nothing goes quite according to plan. The mercenaries and terrorists who seize an oil rig converted into an international resort are almost too busy wanting to kill each other to get on with the job, for one thing, and, for another, the group they take hostage are a high-school reunion rather than the conference of the internationally famous they are expecting. One of the high-school year went on to be a famous gangland hardman before reforming, and another is a darkly brilliant comic whose career is on the skids--and a couple more have spent far too much time in the cinema not to know what Bruce Willis would do... This is a splendidly constructed darkly funny novel in which the oddest things prove suddenly lethal and in which the imagined geography of a closed environment is at once a trap, and a playground for heroism, double cross and the sudden discovery of true love. The running gags and knowingness about movies ought to be less amusing than they are, but Brookmyre's underlying affection for ordinary people and contempt for bullies stops them being self-indulgent.
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All Fun and Games Until Somebody Loses An Eye belongs to the half of Brookmyre's work less concerned with the state of the Scottish nation and more with what happens when iconically ordinary Scots are dumped into the middle of Hollywood plots. Here, we have, on the one hand, an international trouble-shooting organization most of whose agents are on the run from some sort of trouble themselves, and, on the other, a forty-something grandmother aware that life has passed her by and was not meant to. When someone tries to kidnap her grand-daughter, she responds with inventive viciousness; told to save her family by making a South of France rendezvous, she steals passports, cars and tickets as if she has always been doing it. Recruited merely as an expert on a missing boffin who happens to be her son, Jane demonstrates that the quiet desperation of ordinary life is the best training a super agent could have...This is Brookmyre at his most slyly subversive and viscerally exciting, a daydream which never quite becomes preposterous. --Roz Kaveney
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His books are surrealistic, deeply irreverent and bitingly satirical. His characters may be larger than life, but are always rendered with total plausibility, however outrageous their actions. And the body count of his books is high--the world of Christopher Brookmyre's fiction is as dangerous as it is blackly comic. But is he a crime writer? A Big Boy Did It and Ran Away is another massive phantasmagoria, written with the author's customary caustic wit--and there's a character in it (a fast-living, highly successful assassin) who could have strayed in from a thriller. But such impressions never last for long--Brookmyre belongs to no genre, and this book is as uncategorisable as such previous epics as Boiling a Frog and the splendidly biting Quite Ugly One Morning.In A Big Boy Did It... , his beleaguered hero Raymond Ash is struggling with the banal reality of his life as an English teacher and lamenting the evaporation of his student dreams. Responsibility isn't pleasant, Raymond has found. He takes refuge in a sad virtual existence, his online doodling substituting for real life. And then he encounters an old friend, whom he thought dead. Simon has achieved success in rock star-like terms: massive financial rewards, global travel, even notoriety. But his route has been that of the professional killer, and at that trade he's top of the tree. Raymond is seduced by the excitement of time spent with his old pal, even though he's reluctant to get involved with him again. But get involved he does, and soon every aspect of his life is under threat, with Ray yearning for the pretend violence of a computer game over the messy reality he's catapulted himself into.
Brookmyre sees terrorists and killers such as Simon as being self-deluded; whatever reasons they think they're performing their ruthless activities for (religion, a cause, money), they're really on a sad power trip, sublimating their craving for mass acclaim into violence. But he's never solemn--no diatribes here, unlike the organised religion he has so much distaste for. Brookmyre is adept at pulling the rug from beneath the reader's feet (Simon is attractive, until we get to know him better). The writing is always sharp, always funny, always innovative.--Barry Forshaw
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In Christopher Brookmyre's first two thrillers, Quite Ugly One Morning andCountry of the Blind, his investigative reporter hero Jack Parlabane was a partisan crusader against the sleaze and cronyism of the latter days of Conservative government. In the excellent new Boiling a Frog, Jack finds himself far more confused in an era of spin, so confused, indeed, that he finds himself in jail for burgling the offices of the Catholic Church in Scotland. For once, we know far more than he does--that the outbreak of public morality that has followed a child-porn scandal is as spurious as the photographs which turned up on the hard discs of various senior Labour figures; the excitement here is in watching Parlabane follow his nose through a web of deceit and murder to the truth. By turns passionately analytical and uproariously bawdy, Boiling a Frog works equally well as thriller and satire, a scathingly truthful caricature of the New Scotland. It also has a heart--Brookmyre is as good on the well-characterised plotters' consciences as he is on Parlabane's jail encounters with comically menacing thugs. --Roz Kaveney
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By now, readers know what to expect from the remarkable Mr Brookmyre, and Be My Enemy has all the hallmarks of his caustic wit. The protagonist of his earlier books, the wry Jack Parlabane, makes a welcome reappearance, faced with an intriguing professional problem: he is to take part in a weekend of "corporate teambuilding" in the comfortable surroundings of a secluded estate. But quite what sort of course is this? Jack's instincts as a no-holds-barred hack, skilled at uncovering unpalatable truths, warn him that something unusual is in the offing--but he's not quite prepared for the extremely dangerous sideshow that is to accompany the corporate makeovers.This is wonderfully abrasive stuff, full of the scabrous insights that we read Brookmyre for, and it's good to see ideas shoehorned into the satirically biting prose; while never neglecting the crucial task of keeping us turning those pages, Brookmyre makes some sharp points here; one of them being that we all harbour certain fascist tendencies, stifling a desire to put paid to those who go against us. The Highland country house in Be My Enemy functions as a hot house in which certain ideas along these lines can be explored--and Brookmyre's conclusions are just as likely to upset politically correct leftwingers as they are to ruffle the feathers of staunch conservatives. But don't get the idea that this is any kind of a tract: Brookmyre is a man who knows that ideas in novels must always be at the service of the narrative and that's very much the case here. Jack Parlabane's one-liners are as spot-on as ever, and the juggling of violence and black humour is as precisely judged as we expect from this writer. --Barry Forshaw
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His books are surrealistic, deeply irreverent and bitingly satirical. His characters may be larger than life, but are always rendered with total plausibility, however outrageous their actions. And the body count of his books is high--the world of Christopher Brookmyre's fiction is as dangerous as it is blackly comic. But is he a crime writer? A Big Boy Did It and Ran Away is another massive phantasmagoria, written with the author's customary caustic wit--and there's a character in it (a fast-living, highly successful assassin) who could have strayed in from a thriller. But such impressions never last for long--Brookmyre belongs to no genre, and this book is as uncategorisable as such previous epics as Boiling a Frog and the splendidly biting Quite Ugly One Morning.In A Big Boy Did It... , his beleaguered hero Raymond Ash is struggling with the banal reality of his life as an English teacher and lamenting the evaporation of his student dreams. Responsibility isn't pleasant, Raymond has found. He takes refuge in a sad virtual existence, his online doodling substituting for real life. And then he encounters an old friend, whom he thought dead. Simon has achieved success in rock star-like terms: massive financial rewards, global travel, even notoriety. But his route has been that of the professional killer, and at that trade he's top of the tree. Raymond is seduced by the excitement of time spent with his old pal, even though he's reluctant to get involved with him again. But get involved he does, and soon every aspect of his life is under threat, with Ray yearning for the pretend violence of a computer game over the messy reality he's catapulted himself into.
Brookmyre sees terrorists and killers such as Simon as being self-deluded; whatever reasons they think they're performing their ruthless activities for (religion, a cause, money), they're really on a sad power trip, sublimating their craving for mass acclaim into violence. But he's never solemn--no diatribes here, unlike the organised religion he has so much distaste for. Brookmyre is adept at pulling the rug from beneath the reader's feet (Simon is attractive, until we get to know him better). The writing is always sharp, always funny, always innovative.--Barry Forshaw
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His books are surrealistic, deeply irreverent and bitingly satirical. His characters may be larger than life, but are always rendered with total plausibility, however outrageous their actions. And the body count of his books is high--the world of Christopher Brookmyre's fiction is as dangerous as it is blackly comic. But is he a crime writer? A Big Boy Did It and Ran Away is another massive phantasmagoria, written with the author's customary caustic wit--and there's a character in it (a fast-living, highly successful assassin) who could have strayed in from a thriller. But such impressions never last for long--Brookmyre belongs to no genre, and this book is as uncategorisable as such previous epics as Boiling a Frog and the splendidly biting Quite Ugly One Morning.In A Big Boy Did It... , his beleaguered hero Raymond Ash is struggling with the banal reality of his life as an English teacher and lamenting the evaporation of his student dreams. Responsibility isn't pleasant, Raymond has found. He takes refuge in a sad virtual existence, his online doodling substituting for real life. And then he encounters an old friend, whom he thought dead. Simon has achieved success in rock star-like terms: massive financial rewards, global travel, even notoriety. But his route has been that of the professional killer, and at that trade he's top of the tree. Raymond is seduced by the excitement of time spent with his old pal, even though he's reluctant to get involved with him again. But get involved he does, and soon every aspect of his life is under threat, with Ray yearning for the pretend violence of a computer game over the messy reality he's catapulted himself into.
Brookmyre sees terrorists and killers such as Simon as being self-deluded; whatever reasons they think they're performing their ruthless activities for (religion, a cause, money), they're really on a sad power trip, sublimating their craving for mass acclaim into violence. But he's never solemn--no diatribes here, unlike the organised religion he has so much distaste for. Brookmyre is adept at pulling the rug from beneath the reader's feet (Simon is attractive, until we get to know him better). The writing is always sharp, always funny, always innovative.--Barry Forshaw
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