Christopher Brookmyre telephone interview for this website, June 19th 2007

Hi Chris, could you tell us about the new book please, ATTACK OF THE UNSINKABLE RUBBER DUCKS?

Well, it opens with an atypical narrative for my style – in that it’s a kind of Daily Mail style journalist’s account of an apparent haunting, which sets the agenda for the discussion of scepticism and credulity that the book’s going to explore. Rather than an apparition it’s all to do with a voice that’s heard, in the presence of a noted American psychic – although he’s smart enough not to call himself a psychic. And that sets the scene for moving on to Parlabane, and an even more intriguing introduction… being that he’s giving his version of events from ‘beyond’! … which is also a way of letting the reader know this is entirely going to be a question of whether there’s communication from the spirit world.

With Parlabane I never want to come back and write ‘the next episode’ of a series of similar stories, the area I wanted to write about he was the right character to have in it but it would be a very different style and also a very different kind of subject matter for crime fiction. Obviously this area will sit more naturally with the sort of spooky horror genre in some respects, but there’s plenty of crime involved.

I suppose the other rather strange twist is that Parlabane’s been elected Rector of a university.

Yes, that was slightly surprising . . !

But the nature of his election is clearly problematic, to say the least. But probably about right for Parlabane. I wanted to write a very different kind of Parlabane story and a very different kind of crime novel. You’d probably call it more of a mystery novel in that respect than a crime novel, because certainly the people that have read it to my great satisfaction have said they were kind of powering through it, driven less by ongoing action than by a quite compelling desire to find out just what the hell’s really going on.

Another thing that’s intrigued me is that a few of the people that have read it have said that as soon as they finished it they wanted to go back and read it again just to see how it all looked from an informed point of view. It’s got a constantly alternating narrative perspective of first-person narration, because it’s all about perspective, the world of psychics and mediums and supposedly the paranormal. It’s very much about perception, how it looks from your point of view. Which is why you get to see it first-person through Parlabane’s eyes and through the eyes of other characters. And I suppose for all it’s a crime novel and a Parlabane novel in many ways it’s almost the same territory as THE SACRED ART OF STEALING, because it’s all about misdirection.

It’s an area I have a lot of enthusiasm for which is why I’ve hopefully poured all that enthusiasm into it. A lot of the time people ask how you researched something . . .

Well I was going to ask, did you have to do a lot more research for this than usual?

I would say it’s the most informed book I’ve ever written in terms of specialised knowledge. But I think I kind of did it the opposite way round. Normally writers will decide they’re going to write a book about a field and they’ll then go off and research about it. But in my case it was more that I’d started reading about this area and began reading more and more about it. When I was writing the screenplay for Prey – or even before that – for this (forthcoming) horror film, because I was reading up on the supernatural, I got that kind of Amazon thing where you go to buy a book on one subject and before you know it you’ve bought half a dozen vaguely related. And following that chain I started off on the supernatural and then started to learn an awful lot about sceptical enquiry into the supernatural, and from that a lot of stuff about science, and meta-science.

As a result, I think maybe a year had gone by and I’d read so much of this stuff and it was so fascinating. And from a crime writing point of view…most good crime fiction is about deception, and about the psychology of deception, and seeing how one character’s going to be able to outwit another, and so it was the stuff of good crime fiction. I thought I’ve got to come up with a story involving this stuff because it’s fascinating to me, and I think if you find something fascinating as a subject then you can convey that enthusiasm in a story. So it was not a question of me researching it, it was more a question of a story emerging from an area of great interest.

Which is why I suppose as well as telling the story it’s got a lot of background about how certain things are done and how we came to… I suppose to accept certain notions – I mean … people, if you start talking about the spirit world, they’ll naturally talk about the whole “knock once for yes, knock twice for no”, and I think people have a perception that this sort of stuff has been around forever. And it’s actually quite surprising when you learn how comparatively recent some of it is... and the fact that the whole “knock once for yes, twice for no”, and in fact the entire spiritualist movement was the result of two attention seeking teenage girls. It’s fascinating to me and also I felt a certain compulsion to broadcast some of that information, because I think the more people are aware of it the more it punctures some of the silly superstitions.

And it made me think of that piece you wrote about Intelligent Design. Was that something you were thinking about as well?

It came at the same time. I think I must have written that probably while I was half way through writing the book. I mean I see it all as very much tied in, because when you start researching sceptical enquiry into the paranormal you find that the same writer, the same sceptical minds are applied – one day they’ll be applied to people pretending to have psychic powers and another day they’re applied to fending off the arguments of creationists. It’s kind of the same field and that’s sort of the point I was wanting to make, because it’s not only the same field in terms of applying logic and the principles of science it’s also the same field in that people see it as a kind of harmless side pursuit whether it’s visiting a medium or belief in psychics but I suppose the book’s trying to make the point that once you start believing in this nonsense that it ultimately leads to things like Intelligent Design and people trying to teach that in schools.

There was a story in the Sunday newspaper up here at the weekend about this very issue, about privately funded organisations who are trying to put pressure on schools in Scotland and trying to get Intelligent Design into the science curriculum, which is exactly as predicted in the book. When I set out to write the book initially I thought people would accuse me of going after a soft target, because, you know, who takes psychics and mediums seriously anymore? The problem is, well, 1) lots of people do, and 2) the deeper danger is that if we start believing, or continuing not to enquire correctly and scientifically about these absurd superstitions then ultimately what it leads to is teaching people that the world is 4,000 years old.