Jobbies, Nine Inch Nails, reality TV, hoovering and Hollywood – Christopher Brookmyre, one of Scotland’s premier crime fiction authors, speaks to Alternative Nation.
Alternative Nation: Swearing features quite heavily in your writing: can you tell us your favourite swearword and why?
Christopher Brookmyre: I don’t know if I could even call it a swearword, but I’d have to go with the word jobby. There’s something quite intrinsically funny about it in any circumstance; even just onomatopoeically speaking it is a funny sounding word.
AN: How did you get started writing?
CB: Having worked in newspapers people think that there’s some kind of progression, but there really wasn’t. I wanted to be a writer for as long as I can remember… since I was about six-years old. In fact, when I worked in newspapers I worked as a sub-editor and wasn’t even doing any writing – I was only ever interested in writing fiction. I was writing in my spare time when I was working in London but when I moved to Edinburgh I was freelance so I’d take two months out of the year to write a book because I realised you needed that exclusive time to think about only one thing. I think you can’t really do it at weekends and evenings. I kept at it and wrote four books before I even got one published.
AN: Have you ever considered going back to your early books and reworking them for publication?
CB: No, because the reason they were never published was that they weren’t very good. I was trying to write what I thought would get published – largely far more serious crime thrillers – and the problem was that they weren’t in the type of idiom that I’ve come to write subsequently. I don’t mean just the narrative style, but the whole story. I’ve just put them down to very valuable experience. They’re very handy to refer to when people ask, “How did you get your break?” They want one of two answers there: they want you to have some kind of magic contact to make everything happen or they want to hear that you’re the son of a publisher so they can decide, “Ah, well, it’s just nepotism.” When you tell people that it requires not just writing a whole book, but going back to the blank page again and again until you’re actually good enough to get published, it tends to be an unpopular answer for aspiring writers.
AN: Have you found a formula that works? Do you actively go out to challenge what your readers will expect you to do next?
CB: I’m never really sure what works, I just know what hasn’t worked in the past. I’m always trying to play on the readers’ expectations – I never want to go out and write the same book with different names which I think tends to happen. I’ve tried, whenever possible, to take what I think readers expect from my books and subvert that in some way. A good example I suppose would be when I wrote
A Big Boy Did It and Ran Away. Having written a few books before that in which you were largely invited to agree with the ranting narrator, I introduced a ranting narrator who you begin having some sympathy with and then gradually realise that he’s totally psychotic. I try and pull as many surprises out of the fire as I can.
AN: Do you have any plans for any more books based on Jack Parlabane?
CB: I’ve put a few clues in down the years about how badly I’ve treated him. He’s a character that I never intended to write a series of books about – he’s probably one of the least developed characters because of that. When I write a Parlabane book it means I can concentrate on the story and the issues more than having to develop a new character. I’ve always seen him as a good vehicle for exposing something completely different each time. I’ve never set out to write another Parlabane book: I’ve always come up with a story and thought he’d be ideal to put in there. Each time I think I’ve had enough of him there seems to be another story that comes up that’s the perfect vehicle for bringing him back.
AN: Are your characters based on actual people, or are they just some kind of amalgamation of different people you’ve come across?
CB: They often spring purely from imagination. I’ll think of a story I want to tell. For instance, with Jane Bell in
All Fun and Games Until Somebody Loses An Eye I had just thought of the idea of a woman hitting middle age and fearing that she’d given up the best years of her life and that’s just the starting point for a character. I’ll base bits and pieces on things I’ve picked up. I was talking to a friend who was getting so obsessive about hoovering that whenever she had visitors round she couldn’t wait for them to leave so that she could get the food crumbs off the carpet again with the hoover! These are just wee observations and details, but I wouldn’t say I take that and base a character on it. The only time I’ve consciously based a character on someone from real life is my primary school headmaster who is the headmaster in
A Tale Etched in Blood and Hard Black Pencil, and that was just because I really couldn’t have come up with anything more absurd than the truth. If there are aspects of anyone’s character in there then there’s probably bits of mine, but not always in the way that people expect. I tend to put more of myself into my villains: I think it’s quite a healthy psychological process to take all the things you don’t like about yourself and then blow them up. The next time you’re about to do something like that or think that you remember this horrible creation and think, ‘Actually, no, I’ll just rein myself in there.’
AN: In a similar vein then, is this why you haven’t actually gone out and robbed a bank despite describing the process so meticulously in The Sacred Art of Stealing?
CB: The great thing about writing fiction is that you can give the impression that you would be a criminal genius because people forget that you’re controlling the actions of the police as well as the criminals so you can always misdirect the reader or have the police not ask a question that might expose the grand plan. The bank robbery in that book, I took it upon myself to come up with a whole load of absurdity, but have every aspect of the absurdity become necessary to the robbery. So, any flight of fancy that I had I couldn’t use unless I could come up with a reason that it would be beneficial. In the end, it looks like it was all ingenious but it was really just an exercise in me thinking up daft things and then coming up with a reason for them. Admittedly, there’s an editorial process there so if something’s gonna make things impractical I ditch them, but in the end there’s nothing surreal or strange in that robbery that doesn’t play a vital role in the robbery’s execution and it’s nothing compared to some of the stuff that’s gonna be pulled off in the book I’ve got coming out in the summer. I really don’t want anybody to psychoanalyse me on the basis of that book because it’s the most evil, dark piece of writing I’ve ever committed to paper.
AN: Can you tell us a bit more about the new book?
CB: I’ve brought back Simon Darcourt from
A Big Boy Did It and Ran Away and he’s killing reality TV stars, celebrities and people from TV talent programmes. Just a whole load of stuff that I’ll be honest and say I’m totally sick of. Well, I say sick of, but that suggests I’ve ever had a tolerance for them. It’s stuff that I’ve always hated so he lets me have my cake and eat it: I get to do horrendous things to people but blame it all on him. This also sees the return of Angelique De Xavia and Zal Innes from
The Sacred Art of Stealing and it’s a very complicated little triangle.
AN: It’ll be interesting to see characters from different books interacting with each other finally…
CB: I’d always intended to return to them at some point but I was never going to do it until I had a really good story for them. Also, I though I can’t really bring back Simon Darcourt and not have Angelique involved because naturally when he reappeared the police would have to engage. I couldn’t bring back Angelique without bringing back Zal because everyone seems to want to know what happened to the two of them a year later. I set them aside for an idea that would pull all three of them together but it had to be better than any of the books they’d been in before and I think I’ve done that. I think it’s the best book I’ve written and most of the people who’ve read it have said that if not the best, then it’s certainly among the best.
AN: You often mention football in your books, do you have any plans to write a novel based around a football team?
CB: I think that the big stumbling block for me is that it would potentially alienate a lot of people. I can get away with mentioning football here and there, although I sometimes do it subtly so that people won’t even know that they’re missing an allusion there. But I think that people who are not interested in football, if I wrote a book about football, wouldn’t fancy it one bit and I think they’d also kinda be more of a football fan book: not only would it be about football but they’d have to be a bit clued up on it. If a good enough story came along, it’d be something I’d be interested in exploring but it’s very tricky because, for all I’ve got an opinion on it, a lot of people don’t – which is another way of saying that my wife probably wouldn’t let me!
AN: After the TV adaptation of Quite Ugly One Morning, has there been any more interest in adapting your novels for the screen?
It’s all, as ever, very slow. The company that have optioned
All Fun and Games… have commissioned a screenplay from an Irish writer, John McNally, and I think they’re on a second draft. I think they’re quite serious and kinda know what they’re doing but it’s an ambitious project so I don’t even get excited about it and I don’t even pursue news: I just wait for them to e-mail stuff to me occasionally.
AN: There’s an element of the Hollywood blockbuster to your novels – given the chance would you like to adapt your novels for film in a big brash Hollywood style or a gritty British style?
CB: Oh, God, absolutely the Hollywood one. I love summer blockbusters – I’d much rather sit through a dumb Hollywood blockbuster than a highly critically acclaimed gritty British movie. I often find them tedious. My problem with highly acclaimed British movies is I think that they’d lose nothing on the small screen. I think we kinda lost something in the UK when they stopped showing
Play for Today: It was a great piece of television and was a perfect vehicle for lots of lovely, but slightly dull dramas that unfortunately now when they get made they get put on cinema screens and a lot of the time they don’t belong there. If I had the chance and the budget I’d probably make
One Fine Day in the Middle of the Night because it would be the most cinematic.
AN: Would you ever consider collaborating with a games company, for example to write the dialogue and story for a first person shooter?
CB: Oh yeah, if any of them asked me to I would immediately. Novelists have been used before for gameplay, in
Half-Life for example, but nobody’s approached me. It’s something I would be interested in because I don’t get as much time to play these things as I used to, but my son plays them so I sort of play them vicariously through him. When I do get time, I’m very lax about new stuff I tend to go back and play old school stuff again like
Quake and
Quake II.
AN: You’ve thanked Everclear in a few of your novels, how important is music to your writing?
CB: I couldn’t say I was influenced by it, but certainly there is music that I can find quite inspirational, or can spark off an idea. I was listening to Everclear a lot when the idea came up for
The Sacred Art of Stealing and there were aspects of that that were related to the type of story I would like to tell. I think the atmosphere of a song can inspire something and that’s why I quoted almost all of the lyrics to
Crime Scene Part One by the Afghan Whigs in
A Big Boy Did it and Ran Away: there was something about the sentiment and the atmosphere that suited the character I was creating. There’s this line, “Do you think I’m beautiful?/Do you think I’m evil?” and this was the dichotomy I was trying to show. The villain, Simon Darcourt, is a very seductive character, but he is also extremely evil.
AN: Do you ever listen to music when you’re writing?
CB: Never. When I’ve been proof reading I’ve put on some purely instrumental stuff, but even that I ended up realising was, perhaps, distracting. Years ago, and this is how much of a gamer geek I was at the time, the instrumental music I used to listen to was the soundtrack music by Nine Inch Nails to the first
Quake game and was only ambient, kinda atmospheric stuff.
AN: You were named Glasgow University’s Young Alumnus of the Year in 2005 – how did that come about?
CB: I’m not sure how it came about in terms of the Uni’s process but I know that I was lobbied for by Professor Willy Maley. I was very surprised and very honoured that it was me that year.
Christopher Brookmyre’s new book,
A Snowball in Hell, will be published in the autumn of this year, with the launch being held at the
Mitchell Theatre on Wednesday 13th August at 7pm. As the man himself says, get your tickets soon as these events always sell out quickly.
http://www.brookmyre.co.uk/
