Christopher Brookmyre

As an unrepentant, welded-on, dedicated Christopher Brookmyre fan I do have to ration these books a bit. So NOT THE END OF THE WORLD has been lurking here for quite a long time, although I was a little startled to learn it was originally published in 1998. Not because it's been lurking for that long but because the central themes, in particular rabid evangelical religious fanatics, intolerance, insistence, terrorism and short-sighted idiocy works just as well now as it did then. Actually make that less startled, more disgusted.

NOT THE END OF THE WORLD does take a little while to get started, which, (weak pun alert - I tried / can't resist) is not the end of the world. Because the guts of the book made me stop and think, and increasingly made me more and more disgusted with the way that the things haven't changed and the lunatics are still out there waving their intolerance in everyone else's faces and shoving their messages down everybody's throats. When I wasn't laughing at their portrayal, I was more than just a little bit annoyed with the sorts of things that Brookmyre was holding a magnifying glass on - right up close and very very pointedly as Brookmyre does best.

This was one of my particular choices for "please myself month". Worked perfectly.

You hear these rumours, and they can panic a person.  "Christopher Brookmyre has gone straight with his latest book."  I was twitchy.  How could he (either to his readers or to himself)?  Surely the man cannot possibly have lost his acute sense of the bizarre, his sly, dry and clever sense of humour.  Could he?  Of course not.  Daft idea.  WHERE THE BODIES ARE BURIED might be a police procedural, crime fiction based book, but it's classic Chris(topher) Brookmyre from the start to the end.  How could it not be!  Glasgow Policing 101 - as explained to one of the main characters Detective Catherine McLeod, when a rookie cop:

'This is Glesca.'... 'Any time you're confused, take a wee minute to remind yourself of that inescapable fact:  this is Glesca.  We don't do subtle, we don't do nuanced, we don't do conspiracy.  We do pish-heid bampot bludgeoning his girlfriend to death in a fit of paranoid rage induced by forty-eight hours straight on the batter.  We do coked-up neds jumping on a guy's heid outside a nightclub because he looked at them funny.  We do drug-dealing gangster rockets shooting other drug-dealing gangster rockets as comeback for something almost identical a fortnight ago.  We do bam-on-bam.  We do tit-for-tat, score-settling, feuds, jealousy, petty revenge.  We do straightforward.  We do obvious.  We do cannaemisswhodunit.  When you hear hoofbeats on Sauchiehall Street, it's gaunny be a horse, no' a zebra...'.

Phew.  Brookmyre without a rant ... well ... I'd have to double check that the earth's rotation was still in alignment.

But is this good crime fiction?  Yes.  In a nutshell.  It's very good crime fiction.  It's a nice, complicated, and very believable plot.  It's full of the sorts of cunning and stupidity that you expect from the cops and crooks.  There's dedication, there's a bit of the past coming forward to screw with the present, the interlacing of worlds over many generations.  There's also more than enough twists and turns, and even a couple of lovely poignant moments.  There's some hugely funny moments, there's some poignant ones as well.  One of Brookmyre's talents has always been to create very believable, human characters.  McLeod is a marvellous combination of a dedicated, clever senior cop with a home life and all the doubts and insecurities that lots of people with rotten jobs have about hanging onto everything they hold dear.  Another main character - Jasmine Sharp, niece of a missing ex-cop, private detective - recently bereaved when her mother and sole parent died, Jasmine's a bit of a mess, to put it mildly.  She's not the world's greatest trainee private detective, but she gets points for being a very dedicated workmate and friend to her boss.  Two excellent female characters, different from each other, but the same in many ways, Brookmyre's also created a supporting cast who work with these two extremely well.  Okay there's one scenario that's a bit hard to swallow at the start of the book - but the end of the book explains it all - and besides that, it wasn't until I was well into the action that the lightbulb went off and this reader suddenly went... what the?

That's the other thing that works in WHERE THE BODIES ARE BURIED, as it does in any Brookmyre book. The pace is fantastic.  The action rolls on, the people do their thing, the tension rises, the reader loses sleep.  

There's nothing worse than a panic over where one of your favourite authors is going.  Dismiss it from your minds.  Chris / Christopher / Mr Brookmyre, whatever he and his publishers want to call him knows how to write books.  Very good books.  WHERE THE BODIES ARE BURIED is one of them.

I think I'll just keep saying this until I run out of breath completely - but really, the world needs more quality collections of Crime Short Stories.  CRIMESPOTTING, a fabulous little volume put together as a fund raiser for The ONECITY Trust, is subtitled "An Edinburgh Crime Collection".  It features stories by lesser and well known authors including (in alphabetical order) Lin Anderson, Kate Atkinson, Margaret Atwood, Christopher Brookmyre, John Burnside, Isla Dewar, A.L. Kennedy, Denise Mina, Ian Rankin and James Robertson.  (There are some stories here which go on to be included in the Mammoth Book of Best British Crime which I'm going to mention in a review soonish).  The requirement for inclusion was that the story included a "crime" and was set in Edinburgh.  The results are remarkedly diverse.

Needless to say I've been reading a few short story collections recently.  Mostly because I find them such a fascinating form of writing, although I also find them almost invaluable for filling in the dreaded "waiting time" that seems to go with life these days.  One thing I'm increasingly becoming aware of is that a really really good short story can't be as easy to write as you would think.  A Crime short story in particular still has to provide a reader with some of the elements of the genre that you expect - a crime / investigation / resolution / explanation / consideration / illumination and so on.

What was immediately obvious in CRIMESPOTTING is that there is an incredibly high standard of story-telling in each of these entries - although there are obviously also absolute standout entries.  To be honest I'd have a bit of trouble voting for my specific favourite as a lot of them appealed immensely.  Luckily, there's probably something for fans of all sorts of different sub-genres.  

For this reader, CRIMESPOTTING (and The Mammoth Book of Best British Crime for that matter) really were a master class in short story reading.  Good enough to go back and reread many of the entries, CRIMESPOTTING became a permanent resident of the car glovebox a while ago.  It will head back there after this review has been written as flicking back through the book there's a couple of entries I'd like to read again.

Fans of Christopher Brookmyre's dark, black-comedic writing are probably going to do what I did when this book arrived.  A bit of dignified happy dancing and a general clearing of the activity calendar to sit down for a jolly good read and, along the way, a lot of very undignified laughing.  A lot of readers new to this writer may be stepping away from the book (and this review) in droves.  But really - don't.  To steal a famous phrase - do yourself a favour  (perhaps this needs to come with a strong language alert).

Sure Christopher Brookmyre writes gory, savage, lunatic satire with little regard for "social sensibilities" or "political correctness".  But within the lunacy of a bunch of school kids, pretty well intent on the things that teenagers have always been intent on - the booze, sex, drugs and partying bit of the recovery retreat; there is some fantastic sense and sensibility in the way that Brookmyre gives us a storyline, a morality play in many many ways and a set of characters to really get involved in.

It goes without saying that any military base, deep in the highlands of Scotland, that appears to have opened the very Gates to Hell, releasing horned creatures with long tails, is probably going to stuff it up.  Calling in Cardinal Tullian of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith aka The Inquisition, allowing him to torture and torment the demons, and then announcing the shutdown of the place would obviously lead to a spot of sabotage, and the release of the demons of Hell.  Which has to happen about the same time as a bunch of school children arrive in a slightly damaged bus at a resort very nearby.  Of course the bus is damaged, a simple bus trip full of kids isn't going to be a method of transporting people from A to B in Brookmyre's hands - it's got to get a bit pear-shaped just to make sure that the group's chaperones arrive at the resort just that little bit frazzled to start off with.

And lunacy, gore, elaborate death scenes, and a hefty does of utter and total chaos needless to say happens.  But in all this build-up, and within the night where all hell breaks lose, Brookmyre does what he does so well.  Stereotypes are tipped on their heads, expectations turned inside out, people - kids; adults; bullies; goths; priests and the preachy; bitches and the sweet; the chaste and the profligate all step up to the mark, and you find yourself caring about each and everyone of them.  You also find that what you see is not always what you get, and sometimes people are more than the sum of their external persona, and sometimes they're not.  The portrayal of teenagers in this book is particularly delightful - and particularly reminiscent, and something I wish I'd read when I was that age and wondering why I was the only one in the world that thought / looked / behaved / stuck out like I did.

Undoubtedly extremely violent, gory and confrontational, (it's fiction for goodness sake, personally I'm not convinced that I need to worry I could be torn limb from limb by the demons of Hell in the middle of the Scottish Highlands), PANDAEMONIUM is considerably more than it's external persona.  Not just a bit of a dig at a bunch of societal attitudes, Brookmyre digs a hole through to the depths of hell and buries a heap of garbage in it, and he does it delivering something that will make you snort with laughter, hold your breath with anticipation, and finish with great regret.