An interview with Christopher Brookmyre from Writer's Block magazine, 2003, courtesy of Simon Monger, page 2 of 6.

How do you feel about the comparisons that are made between your novels and those of Carl Hiassen? Do you think it is a fair comparison?

They were very fair, I’d say, back when I did QUITE UGLY ONE MORNING. I wrote that after gorging myself on just about everything Carl Hiassen had written. I think the reason I took to it so much was that the style mirrored the way I liked to write when I was writing satirical articles. I thought, well why is nobody doing this about what’s going on in Britain? It was the fag end of the Tory years and there seemed to be plenty of corruption to write about and no one seemed to be doing it. I thought why don’t I have a shot, especially as my wife kept nagging me to write something about what was going on in the NHS. QUITE UGLY ONE MORNING was largely influenced by Carl Hiassen, in particular having the kind of lumbering seven foot goon who gets into an increasingly poor state of repair as the story progresses. That was really my nod to Carl Hiassen by having that character. I wouldn’t say it’s quite such a fair comparison as my own ideas have taken me off in different directions.

Your short stories at school upset your teachers. Did you write that sort of thing because you knew it would guarantee such a reaction?

No, I wrote strictly what I wanted to and what interested me. I had an English teacher who was enormously encouraging of all this stuff. The problem was that on one occasion she thought what I’d written was particularly good and she showed it to the Head of the English department. What she meant was, I think you should have a look at this as in, I think this guy’s got something. The Head of the English department, being a stereotypical matronly Catholic, thought she was showing it as in, I think you should look at this because there are issues here. [laughs] So she looked at this revolting story full of horrendous violence, profanity and reference to necrophilia at one point, and flipped her lid, basically. [laughs] So to this day she’s probably telling people that she was an enormous influence on me!

You seem very anti-religion, especially in NOT THE END OF THE WORLD where you put a TV evangelist on a cross. Did your childhood spent in the midst of Glaswegian separatism contribute to this?

Not so much just my childhood. I went to a Catholic school. My Mum’s Catholic, but what you’d call a liberal Catholic. It was more the attitude that you’re exposed to at school from teachers and the things your priest says. Growing up and seeing the incompatibility, basically [laughs] between religion and reality. That’s where I would draw the line. On one level the absurdity of it attracted me in terms of it was something I felt that I wanted to draw attention to. There was an awful lot of righteous anger as well.

You aren’t afraid to say what you think, even if it may not be to everybody’s taste. Do you worry that you are alienating possible readers?

Not in the least. I never worry about that. There’d be no point in putting pen to paper if you were worried about what would appeal to everybody. I also think that the type of person who’s gonna be offended by what’s likely to be in my books is probably the type of person least likely to pick one up in the first place. I do usually make it fairly obvious from the off. With most of my novels there’ll be something right at the start that let’s people know what they’re in for.

Do you see your writing as a political tool, or do you just want to write down your opinions and see who shares them?

They’re not always my opinions. Sometimes it’s just the opinions that are appropriate to the character that I’m creating. Sometimes I write down opinions that are exaggerations of my own or a diametric opposite of my own. It’s whatever works with the character. I don’t really see it as a political vehicle because I don’t consider myself as overtly political or ideologically aligned in any way. I think it’s an indigenously Glaswegian thing. Glaswegians tend not to miss and hit the ball. We don’t go in for subtly hinting at our beliefs and opinions, we tend to be fairly unambiguous. I think it was P. G. Woodhouse who said, “It’s seldom difficult to distinguish between a ray of sunshine and a Scotsman with a grievance.”

Despite appearances, your novels are all very moralistic. Good always triumphs over evil. On the other hand, Jack Parlabane is a morally ambiguous character. Is it important to you that your books are moralistic?

Yes. It always surprises me when people talk about my novels as being particularly dark. I tend to think of them as, on the whole, a form of feel good fiction. They’re supposed to be escapist thrillers and the good guys win in the end. I suppose I am a fairly strongly moral person but without wanting to seem moralistic. There’s a difference between morality and judgementalism.

Your novels can be quite graphic as well as being controversial. Is there a line you will not cross or a topic you will not cover?

I doubt it. There might be things that I wouldn’t go into because I didn’t feel sufficiently qualified or that just seemed inappropriate for the tone. I have no idea what I’m likely to write about in the future, so I can’t say that there’s anything I wouldn’t write. I found that while I was writing A BIG BOY DID IT AND RAN AWAY that I was actually liberated to be able to use allusions, images and metaphors that I might not have been able to write in the past. I was writing from the point of view of Simon Darcourt who is just such a monster. He will say all the inappropriate things. At one point he talks about a situation being like a mass rape at a prisoner of war camp, which is the kind of metaphor that you just wouldn’t be able to get away with under another context. It might alienate the reader and the thing with Simon is that he is supposed to gradually alienate the reader. Having said that, my wife’s reading the new book and she always objects to something. There’s always one line or something and she says, you can’t say this, and it’s usually the one line everybody talks about later! In fact my editor had already remarked on being particularly keen on the line. [laughs] It’s just talking about the last time that Aberdeen won at Ibrox was back when Fred West could have fielded a full team for Family Fortunes...!

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