An interview with Christopher Brookmyre from Writer's Block magazine, 2003, courtesy of Simon Monger, page 3 of 6.

Do you have people who read through your first drafts and say, look I think that might be going a bit far? Or the opposite, saying I think you should bring out this theme a bit more?

My editors very seldom cut anything out, only just occasionally cut things out if they, as you say, think I’ve gone too far into a subject. With the last book they suggested I cut down some of the computer game stuff and there’s a lot more 1980s music stuff. Often they say, we like this character, we like this idea, can you get stuck in and give us some more. ONE FINE DAY... they wanted more satire on British tourists' morays and also they wanted more of the kind of drunk guys at the back of the bar. [laughs]

ONE FINE DAY... was the first book I read and it was the film references in particular that caught my attention. Do you worry that these references might date your novels quickly, or do you like having a shared knowledge with the reader?

I like that. I like the fact that there’s something that can be communicated through that like a kind of cultural short hand. I think novels will be dated anyway, but I don’t think these references will date them really. They’ll date them in a more immediate sense. Somebody reading the novel in ten years time will enjoy most of the same things, I think, and have a little nostalgic chuckle.

Your heroes are all relatively normal, everyday Joes. They tend to be in Die Hard situations with one man against the world. Is that an intentional thing you did?

[doorbell] Yeah, actually I’ve got the bloody window cleaner at the door now. Nobody ever phones me up or comes round unless I’m doing one of these things. I’ll just be a sec. [After returning from answering the door, he launches straight in without needing a prompt.] Yes. Die Hard was my favourite action movie. I think the first time I saw it I was blown away by it. The whole idea was familiar, as I’d written a short story at school along the same lines, you know, of terrorists taking over a building at the same time as one person gets away. The reason it works, the reason it stood above all the other action movies was simply that it wasn’t your kind of superman Schwarzeneggar-Stallone figure. I think that shows the vulnerability and, even though you knew he was a cop, you still felt that the odds were against him. With ONE FINE DAY..., and a lot of my books, I like to come up with a massive scale concept and throw in very ordinary characters because I think if you have a massive scale concept with massive scale characters they tend to cancel each other out. People have more fun if they can imagine how either themselves or the type of people they know would react in a bizarre situation. It’s a bit boring if you know how some highly trained soldier is going to react to a situation. It’s not very interesting compared to how someone who is an electrician or a schoolteacher might react to a situation.

Do you find that the characters you create are amalgams of people you have known, or are they fictional?

A bit of both. You do find that perhaps certain traits of individuals might creep in here and there but not always in the most obvious or predictable way. There might be aspects of people that you like that creep into the villains and vice-versa. But sometimes the characters do just create themselves and aren’t like any people you have known.

Does the written form allow you certain freedoms you do not find elsewhere?

Yes, there’s a certain, what the French call “the spirit of the staircase”, by which they mean all the things that you wish you’d said when you’re going down the stairs after the argument. When you’re writing you get to do that. You get to give your characters all the lines that – it’s not even a question of whether you’d have the balls to say them – the lines that you don’t even think of. I think that’s part of the escapism. People get to read the things that sound best in the situation. There’s a great freedom in that respect and obviously the freedom to put down your ideological opinions or your little cultural peccadilloes.

Your novels are very American in style. Is this an intentional thing because of the time you spent in Los Angeles, or is it to widen your potential readership?

No, it’s more just a natural process of what kind of stories appealed to me down the years. I’m probably reading a lot of American fiction and seeing a lot of American movies. I tend to think in these sort of grand scale, widescreen terms. I don’t have any real grounding in British crime fiction.

Do you think that this is because there aren’t many British crime fiction writers, or is it just that you haven’t come across them?

There’s certainly an awful lot of them now, and better and better, but certainly for a long time the British crime novel was very much the novel of the murder mystery in a cosy country house, which never really appealed to me.

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