Edinburgh International Book Festival: Christopher Brookmyre
The author of 17 novels in as many years, Christopher Brookmyre enjoys the attention of a packed tent tonight, visiting the Edinburgh Book Festival to talk about his latest book, Flesh Wounds. It's the third part in what he likes to refer to as “the not funny trilogy,” following the character of private eye Jasmine Sharp, and Detective Catherine McLeod.
A heady mix of taut thriller plots, now-legendary scatological gags, spectacular violence and a particularly Scottish blend of gallows humour are the author's signature style, but in recent years he has been experimenting; chiefly with the novels starring McLeod and Sharp. Beginning with the fantastic Where The Bodies Are Buried, the humour was largely excised, and the focus sharply pulled to take in the intricacies of a more traditional procedural novel, with flashes of social commentary. In particular, his choice of two strong, female lead characters felt like new territory for the author.
In addition, he has written two more experimental novels – Bedlam, about a character sucked into a computer game world, and Pandaemonium, which he describes as “a spin on the rules of the horror movie.” Bedlam is now being developed into a computer game, with Brookmyre assisting on plot and dialogue – yet another sign that he continues to evolve as a writer. Or as he puts it: “I'm still in touch with my inner geeky 14 year-old.”
Before reading from Flesh Wounds, Brookmyre reads a selection of reviews of his first novel, mostly by American readers, from the period when it was being sold as an Amazon Kindle 99p deal. The objections to his “British way of talking,” frequent and very Scottish profanity, and use of the opening line “Jesus fuck” are hilarious, allowing him to digress once more into jobbie territory as he details his objections to the phrase “taking a shit.” Yes, the humour he often deals in is base – but it is also incredibly funny, and Brookmyre is an immensely likeable speaker.
The extract from Flesh Wounds is fantastic, managing to encapsulate a potted history of a gang of crooks who have become the focus of the trilogy, before delivering a killer final punch in the last paragraph. It's a great example of how to write a first chapter – steering the reader in one direction before smacking them in the face with the literary equivalent of a crowbar. Even shorn of most of its humour, and lacking jobbie references, Brookmyre's terse, colloquial prose and wry, cynical characters are immediately engaging. He has more than proved his mettle as a writer of so-called 'serious' crime-fiction with the McLeod / Sharp novels. “You're always learning more about your characters, the more you write them,” he says, describing how even the novel's antagonists have become more real, more complex as the trilogy has progressed.
Brookmyre's characters, significantly, are always flawed; always having to face up to their own inadequacy, cowardice and weakness. This is intentional, he says, because most male writers can be “a bit too obsessed with the cult of the hard man.” Using two female viewpoint characters has allowed him to avoid the pitfalls of this, but also comment obliquely on the ultra-macho worlds of the likes of Jack Reacher. “Flesh Wounds is my most accomplished, morally complex novel,” he says – on the evidence of tonight, that could well be the case.