Chris Brookmyre on price of parenthood and a new threat to the arts

His son Jack, who’s 24, moved out a fortnight ago. A budding stand-up comic, Jack worked on his routines in the same room where his dad wrote the bestsellers that have shifted more than two million copies in Britain alone.

Brookmyre is beloved internationally for his wise-cracking, blood-splattered, hipster novels with their distinctively witty and lengthy titles: All Fun and Games Until Somebody Loses an Eye; A Big Boy Did It and Ran Away; and One Fine Day in the Middle of the Night.

He’s up there in the pantheon of Scottish crime writing alongside William McIlvanney, Val McDermid and Ian Rankin. His latest novel, The Cracked Mirror, a mash-up of Agatha Christie-style ‘cosy crime’ and hardboiled LA noir, is out this week.

If you’re looking for a crime writer plagued with demons, spilling their pain onto the page, though, you’d better look elsewhere. For a man who spends his time committing murder in his imagination, Brookmyre is a teddy bear. Kind, thoughtful, softly-spoken, his beloved wife and son are the centre of his world. 

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There was no horror in his childhood either. Brookmyre seems that most rare of creatures: a writer who’s had a rather wonderful life. 

His childhood in Barrhead, on the outskirts of Glasgow, wasn’t perfect. Whose is? But Brookmyre’s formative years were loving, safe and stable. His neighbourhood was economically and socially “diverse”, he says - some rich, some poor.

Born in 1968, both parents were working class - “from council schemes” - but like many of their generation very aspirational. His dad was an electrician, who set up his own business, and his mum was a secretary who later became a teacher. 

“We lived in a ‘bought hoose’,” he says. “So, I’d a relatively economically middle-class upbringing. In England, people of my generation aspired to be middle-class. In Scotland, you can’t find anyone who admits to being middle-class.”

The one black spot in an otherwise happy childhood was a taste of loneliness. He went to school quite far from his home, so making neighbourhood friends wasn’t easy. “I was quite an isolated kid when I was very young,” he says. 

RELIGION

Nor was he inclined to play in the street with the other local youngsters. His parents may have been upwardly mobile, but where they lived could be rough and tumble.

“I was in a street where there were three other kids who were breaking into houses before they were ten. So I wasn’t hanging around with them. They were basically petty criminals from very troubled backgrounds. So I spent a lot of time in the garden in a world of my own imagination.”

Brookmyre’s parents married “across the religious divide”. Mum was Catholic, and Dad Protestant. He went to Catholic school, and while Brookmyre’s dad “wasn’t some constant dissenting voice” he was an “example” to his son that all was not well with what he was learning at school. “If you’re taught that only Catholics go to heaven, I was like ‘well, I can’t see how that works given my dad is a really nice, kind man’.”

He remains close to his parents, and they still brim with pride over his achievements. “When I was at school, nobody aspired to be a writer. A lot of parents discouraged their kids from pursuing something unorthodox as it seemed risky, but my mum and dad were always very supportive. They’d a sense that anything was possible.”

He was writing stories from Primary Two onwards. “I wasn’t going out to play with the kids across the street, so I was a voracious reader. All through the winter months, I’ve memories of sitting on a beanbag hugged against the radiator reading Roald Dahl in the early years, and then Douglas Adams and Ian Fleming in my teens.”

Chris Brookmyre: “It was also insulting. The implication was ‘if you don’t join us, then you’re standing in the way of progress’. (Image: PA Photos)

When teachers asked pupils to write stories, Brookmyre would hand in “these massive epic things, eight times the length of what everyone else was writing”. At secondary school, his English teacher Patricia Festorazzi told him she marked his essays last because it “gave her something to look forward to. That meant a lot”. Brookmyre has name-checked her in acknowledgements to his novels. Her praise “gave me something special”, he says: she taught him he had talent.

Despite the support of his English teacher, secondary school frustrated Brookmyre. “I’m a big believer in education for its own sake, so I hated how everything was geared towards exam technique and grades.” 

His novel A Tale Etched in Blood and Hard Black Pencil features a pair of characters who “reflect the two sides of my school experience”. There’s Scott “who’s really optimistic and finds everything funny, and is constantly confronted by amusing characters and crazy situations”. And there’s Martin who “reflected how there’s a pervasive cruelty and people just looking for the gap where they could stick the dagger in, or whatever they could use against you”.

He found the almost complete lack of friendships - even just conversations - between boys and girls “very weird”. Rather than blame the religious ethos of the school, Brookmyre jokes: “Maybe it was just that I was in a particularly geeky group.”

The young Brookmyre had plenty to say though, with strong opinions about “pop culture, the arts and politics, but it was almost like if you weren’t one of the cool kids nobody listened to you. So I was keen to get out and go to university and find a completely different social group.”

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UNIVERSITY

He blossomed at Glasgow University where he read English and theatre studies. “I was pretty studious. I wasn’t really part of that culture of sitting drinking coffee in the student union for hours at a time, I was always in the library. It felt a great privilege to be there.” Brookmyre “didn’t want to waste” university. It was a duty to study hard “because you’ve access to all these brilliant minds. I wasn’t exactly a wild man on campus”.

He met his wife, Marisa, just before Freshers Week on a “trip to Tomintoul organised by the Catholic Chaplaincy”. Marisa “noticed” Brookmyre when he and the other kids were sitting around after dinner chatting. He launched into a comic and “irreverent rant about how the three priest in my parish were two bigots and a simpleton, one was away with the fairies. I wasn’t spewing anger, but Marisa said she’d never heard anybody talk about priests like that. It made her think I was quite cool”.

While his mum was always “devout”, Brookmyre thinks his dad’s “sceptical outlook must have crept in”. However, his mother “was also inclined to be quite vocal if she thought a priest was an idiot. There wasn’t slavish adherence”.

An “intellectually curious” teenager, Brookmyre says that “the more I looked, the less I found answers in religion”. As he and Marisa got to know each other, they were still going to mass but “increasingly frustrated by the hypocrisy and absurdity” of religion.

Brookmyre eventually lost his faith. “There was no great epiphany. It was more a realisation that we’d already left the church behind before we stopped going.” Since then, he’s been an atheist, though not of the dogmatic strain.

“We used to say that our relationship was one long struggle to spend time together” (Image: Newsquest)

Marisa was also at Glasgow University. Brookmyre graduated a year before her as she was studying to be a doctor. He didn’t write much fiction as a student, there were too many essays to hand in, but he did find a creative outlet during his summer holidays. 

He got a job with British Gas and while there wrote a parody of the in-house magazine. Staff loved it, and he was asked back the following year to do more editions. So he was pretty much hired as a corporate court jester.

By now, he desperately wanted to be a writer, but just didn’t believe it was a “viable career”. As a young man, he still thought “novelists sprung fully formed from the loins of Zeus”. Saying he wanted to be a writer felt as unobtainable as saying “I want to be an astronaut”. So when he graduated, Brookmyre looked for a stable career. He chose journalism, and worked in London at the magazine Screen International. 

That meant a two-year separation from Marisa while she qualified in medicine. Separation hurt them both, despite regular long-distant commutes to see each other. “We used to say that our relationship was one long struggle to spend time together,” he adds. Those times are long gone. Since 2018, the husband and wife team have written four novels together under the pseudonym Ambrose Parry.

MARRIAGE

Marisa eventually came to London to work once she could practice. They married in 1991. Brookmyre was now starting to believe he could actually become a novelist, and using every spare moment to write.

After four years, the pair returned to Scotland, and Brookmyre took shifts at The Scotsman. Then in a frantic seven-week period on leave from newspapers, he wrote his first novel to be published: Quite Ugly One Morning. Three previous attempts never made it to print. But this one was a hit. He’d arrived. Brookmyre had become a writer. He had a wife he loved, and soon he’d a son he adored too.

Which brings him to Jack leaving home just two weeks ago. “It’s brutal,” he groans, pointing to the space in his study where Jack’s desk once sat. “It’s pretty tough as we were such a tight wee unit. You spend so much of your time organising your life around their needs and then you’re made redundant.”

With Marisa working as a doctor, and Brookmyre a writer, he became a stay-at-home dad throughout Jack’s childhood. “I was the frontline parent. Marisa would be on call, or away first thing in the morning, so I did all the school runs.”

He loved being able to spend so much time with his child, but that close father-son bond means, he says, that with Jack gone “I’m paying the psychic price for it now”.

An empty nest hurts, but work is a great healer, and devising crime novels is an all-consuming job. It’s not just about the attention needed to write well, but the complexity of constructing intricate plots. It’s a hard craft. 

For Brookmyre, crime writing creates a “contract” between writer and reader. “You pose a puzzle and take the reader on a journey, and by the end the puzzle will be resolved in a way that feels intellectually and emotionally satisfying.”

More high-brown “literary fiction sometimes doesn’t offer that contract”, he believes. “It’s often about form rather than content. With genre fiction, people know they’re going to get a story in the old-fashioned sense.”

Brookmyre is “only half-flippant” when he says that Scotland produces so many acclaimed writers “because it’s so miserable here. If it’s raining and you’re stuck indoors you’re constantly looking for ways to improve your life, or transport yourself. I honestly think if we’d a better climate, we’d have contributed less to the world.”

RACE

When it comes to the nation’s reputation for crime writing, it’s down to generations of novelists influencing and “reinforcing” each other. William McIlvanney inspired Ian Rankin; Ian Banks inspired Brookmyre. However, culturally Scotland is still quite closed, he feels. “We’re only starting to get non-white perspectives in our literature.”

Good crime fiction, he says, “engages with society”. It takes readers into a realistic world - one that reflects the political and social concerns of the day. However, it also crucially provides “order”: a “cathartic” resolution in a chaotic world. 

“That’s quite comforting,” Brookmyre says. “I want order. I like a five-act structure. I don’t want something which says ‘everything is open-ended because that’s what life is like’, I know what life is like. If I’m reading, I want life to be distilled, shaped and crafted.”

Brookmyre, despite being acutely aware that he’s lived a happy and lucky life, has his worries and concerns like the rest of us. He uses his writing, though, to “process” his experiences. A Big Boy Did It and Ran Away “processed the pressures of early parenthood”. 

In Boiling a Frog, he dealt with what was troubling him when it came to Scottish society, religion and politics. The novel was written shortly after the creation of the Scottish Parliament. 

Although the anti-LGBT Section 28 legislation was still to be abolished, Brookmyre was uncomfortable with “sabre-rattling” that was coming from churches. “I could sense there was a general unease among senior churchmen that this new institution was about to play a role in our society, and they were keen to insinuate themselves into it. There were arguments in the press over the role of prayer in the new parliament, for example.”

He adds: “That frustrated me. There was a lot that wasn’t being said in the media. I felt like my perspective wasn’t being reflected. I wanted to make sense of what I found absurd.”

ANGER

Evidently, Brookmyre doesn’t shy away from political opinions. He’s outspoken on Twitter, and a well-known Yes voter. Although he’s an almost classic leftie-liberal, he was incensed by recent events which saw sponsorship support stripped from the Edinburgh Book Festival.

The campaign group Fossil Free Books lobbied against the investment firm Ballie Gifford sponsoring the festival, due to links to oil and gas and Israel. Nine UK book festivals - including the Wigtown, Borders and Edinburgh festivals in Scotland - later released a joint statement calling for support following the ending of Baillie Gifford sponsorship.

“I was raging,” says Brookmyre. “Most writers share the goals of Fossil Free Books, but they gave almost no thought to the consequences. Some called it a movement in search of a target.”

While Baillie Gifford was far from perfect, “it was at least trying to move in the right direction. Politics is a world of messy compromises”. The company was crucial to the festival’s outreach work, like bussing children to literary events and sending books to schools. Now that’s at risk. The Edinburgh festival faces impoverishment, and “smaller festivals are in danger”.

The “pursuit of purity is unobtainable in our massively complex world

The campaigners are “burning down” book festivals where “liberal minds” - writers who support the very causes espoused by Fossil Free Books - come to promote their ideas.

Brookmyre drops an aphorism: “Self-immolation is a spectacular form of protest, but what do you do for an encore? It was enormously wrong-headed, naive and bloody-minded. There was an element of duplicity as well. They weren’t prepared to own their mistakes once it blew up in their face.”

The “pursuit of purity is unobtainable in our massively complex world”, he adds. “It was also insulting. The implication was ‘if you don’t join us, then you’re standing in the way of progress’. No, that’s an extremely false dichotomy - we’re just disagreeing with how we get to that progress. What they’re doing is deleterious to the shared goals we have. That offended me.”

Given cultural spending is often bottom of politicians’ priorities, festivals need every penny available. Though Scotland was “fortunate”, he believes, when Nicola Sturgeon was First Minister as she was a “big reader”, and her support for Scottish literature trickled down through government. 

“Whether, when such a champion is removed, that continues, is a whole different question. The mistakes politicians constantly make is to think - like schools - that the arts are a ‘treat’. The arts aren’t a luxury, not in terms of our cultural health or how they contribute to our economy. But that’s a hard-sell when you’ve got the right-wing press. There’s an anti-intellectualism, an anti-arts instinct, that’s always weaponised by the right.”

INDEPENDENCE

Brookmyre still supports independence, but isn’t “evangelical”. By 2014, he’d long tired of “Labour and the Tories formulating policy over what might move the needle in a hypothetical English marginal”. 

However, he has “some intellectual sympathy with Gordon Brown’s federal model”, and feels that “if someone said you could have independence or a proper proportional representation system for the UK, I’d have to think long and hard about which I’d chose”.

He adds: “The dark threat of the Tories has receded for a while, that always takes away the impetus for independence.” When it comes to the SNP, Brookmyre thinks “in some respects it would be good” for the party to spend time in opposition.

“Governments always have a shelf life. You can’t stay in office too long before you become intellectually exhausted, relationships between politicians fray, and factions develop. Any government runs out of steam. It’s unrealistic to think a government can be in power that long and continue to regenerate.”

After the Salmond-Sturgeon years, new leadership “was always going to be the ‘who succeeds Alex Ferguson’ scenario. It’s going to be a series of people who always look inferior to what went before”.

Nevertheless, he’s “not sure how good it would be for Scotland to have Labour controlling Westminster and Holyrood”. Labour “took their position for granted” in Scotland until 2007. Brookmyre feels Keir Starmer still constructs policy “for the consumption of the English electorate”. 

We need “Scottish solutions to Scottish problems”, he believes. As such, he was dumbfounded by the rage around recent hate crime legislation. There were claims in the press that writers, performers and artists would be silenced. Brookmyre was consulted about the law by parliament. 

“There was an awful lot of bad faith posturing. People were trying to make out it was going to result in this massive throttling of creative voices. It clearly wasn’t. And in fact, since it’s inception - crickets. 

“I wasn’t concerned about the hate crime legislation. It was deliberately misrepresented by the usual suspects.” There’s hardly been a wave of arrests since the bill became law, he notes.

He’s equally dismissive of claims around cancel culture. “There’s a small subset of sh*t stand-up comedians who aren’t prepared to accept that the reason they’re not getting gigs is because they aren’t very good. So they tell themselves and their Twitter followers it’s because they’re too edgy or they’re being censored.”

Brookmyre says he isn’t “trivialising” the times when “somebody is fired, but on the 99% of occasions when someone claims they’ve been cancelled, what they really mean is they’ve been criticised, got pushback. And they call that ‘cancel culture’. They use the term so much for it to be meaningless.” 

It reminds him, he says, of the way religious groups have responded to the rise of vocal secular voices. “They claimed they were subject to bigotry or being silenced. All it was, was that for once they were asked to play by the same rules as everyone else - they weren’t been given unearned privileges, and they didn’t like it.”

WOKE

Nor does he have time for anyone using ‘woke’ as an insult. It’s just another bout of the right shouting about ‘political correctness gone mad’, he feels. “That phrase is the distress call of the thwarted bigot,” Brookmyre says.

Unsurprisingly, he’s deeply suspicious of the power billionaire tech tycoons like Elon Musk or Mark Zuckerberg wield via their Twitter and Facebook platforms. Musk rants about ‘the woke mind virus’ regularly. “They’ve become our de facto public square, and ought to be administered more democratically as they can be manipulated.”

His “rule of thumb” when it comes to Twitter: don’t say anything you wouldn’t say to someone’s face. He despairs at what he terms “the rise of the extremely online” - culture warriors who spread “polarisation” across the internet and “artificially inflate particular issues”.

He adds: “The right will keep going for the trans issue because it energises the worst of their base.” Though he also blames the “mainstream media” for “blowing up” issues like anti-European sentiment which led to Brexit.

His major concern when it comes to technology? Artificial Intelligence. It’s not that Brookmyre is a luddite, but he feels personally exploited by AI companies. His back-catalogue of books was ‘scraped’ off the internet and fed into machines to aid language learning. “My entire life’s work was essentially stolen. Somebody just said, ‘we’re having that for free’.”

He’s not taking it lying down, though. Brookmyre might be a nice guy, but he’s no walkover. His publishers are now exploring a class action on behalf of their writers. And why not, he asks: “Could you imagine the law suits if you were found to have completely stolen some proprietary technology that someone had spent their life developing?”