Christopher Brookmyre is a
Scottish crime writer, but his style is more in keeping with American writers such as
Elmore Leonard or
Carl Hiaasen rather than Scottish contemporaries such as
Ian Rankin. Indeed Brookmyre has lived and worked as a journalist in
Los Angeles. Poor sod still supports
St Mirren though. His first novel
Quite Ugly One Morning won a great deal of acclaim and controversy, opening with an immensely funny scene involving a corpse and a load of shit.
Brookmyre captures the feeling of modern Scotland and the east and west coast frictions remarkable well, although a lot of the language and references will be missed by the non-Scot reader. His books deal in the main with greed and corruption by people in high places, and although the plots tend to be somewhat ott and will appeal most to those with liberal lefty tendencies, as Brookmyre never misses a chance to rail against big business and the sleaze that was a legacy of the Major years, but to be fair he is equally vitriolic towards New Labour especially of the Scottish variety in his more recent work.
Quite Ugly One Morning was made into an ITV drama in 2004, starring James Nesbitt as Brookmyre's hack creation Jack Parlabane. It was quite good, despite the inevitable twiddling with the plot, until the ending which was all the wrong way round.
Christopher Brookmyre's output to date is as follows:-
Quite Ugly One Morning (1996)
Country of the Blind (1997)
Not the End of the World (1998)
One Fine Day in the Middle of the Night (1999)
Boiling a Frog (2000)
A Big Boy Did It and Ran Away (2001)
The Sacred Art of Stealing (2002)
Be My Enemy (2004)
All Fun and Games Until Someone Loses an Eye (2005)