The Crime Review - Where The Bodies Are Buried, By Chris Brookmyre
Christopher Brookmyre is the author of fourteen published novels to-date
, the latest being Where The Bodies Are Buried.
In 2006 Christopher won the seventh Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize for Comic Fiction with All Fun and Games Until Someone Loses An Eye and, as is tradition, a Gloucestershire Old Spot pig was named after the winning novel.
On accepting the award, Christopher said:
"My favourite PG Wodehouse quote is 'It is seldom difficult to distinguish between a Scotsman with a grievance and a ray of sunshine'; today I'd like to think that I resemble the ray of sunshine."
Quite Ugly One Morning was the winner of the Critics' First Blood Award for Best First Crime Novel of the Year in 1996.
The short story "Bampot Central" was shortlisted for the Crime Writers' Association Macallan Short Story Dagger in 1997; Christopher has written a fair few other pieces of short fiction.
Boiling a Frog won the Sherlock Award for Best Comic Detective Novel in 2000 and Christopher became the only writer to win two Sherlocks when Be My Enemy picked up the 2004 prize.
In 2007, Christopher was given the Glenfiddich Spirit of Scotland Award for Writing.Christopher
With his latest offering Brookmyre is moving in a new direction. Or should that be Chris is ...? He's dropped the "topher", you see. No idea why. Probably because I haven't asked. Taking a stab, it might be a fair assumption it's to mark a new, more seriously minded chapter in his writing career.
Glasgow detective Catherine McLeod has her hands full with a gangland killing, while wannabe actress Jasmine Sharp is playing private eye, working for her uncle when he goes missing. Both stumble through a web of corruption, turning over stones to reveal a history of violence and horror that questions everything they thought they knew.
Told over a split narrative, the threads intertwine and eventually knot firmly in a story that fails to get the pulse racing.
Brookmyre has abandoned his "comic terror" style to write a hard-nosed conventional crime thriller. His prose remains interspersed with trademark wit, but it now seems misplaced and serves only to interrupt the flow of the story.
It's all fairly standard stuff. Murders, gangs, family tensions, predictable plot twists. That's not to say there's anything wrong with the tried and tested; it's just a shame that a unique writer such as Brookmyre has failed to add any new interesting stops on this old familiar road. To his credit, however, he weaves his plotlines cleverly and the writing is solid, if unspectacular.
The pair of protagonists are nothing to get excited about. They both lack dimension and draw out little empathy. They're defined by long, dull biographical info dumps, which make it hard to see them as anything more than under-developed ideas in Brookmyre's mind. He forces potted histories on to the page, when allowing their backgrounds to be more subtly drawn from scenes might have worked better.
Brookmyre's legacy will remain intact. He's a fine writer and one turkey shouldn't be allowed to damage that. Some authors can reinvent themselves successfully, but on this evidence he should stick to what he knows best.
by: Harry Bingham
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