Weekly Geeks – Author Fun Facts

Weekly Geeks* is a bookbloggers community website which runs a weekly task for bloggers which you can participate in whenever you fancy. I’d not looked at it before but Jackie’s post at farmlanebooks on Jose Saramago piqued my interest, so I’m joining in this week. The task is to take an author who interests you and find out some fun facts about them.  I chose…

Christopher (Chris) Brookmyre.

Brookmyre was born in 1968 near Glasgow, and is an exponent of Tartan Noir which is a much nicer way of describing his books as Scottish crime novels. His books are irreverent and scabrously funny, and feature political and social comment. I would describe them as somewhat Tarantino-esque, but mostly set in Scotland.

His first novel, published in 1997, is called Quite Ugly One Morning and I was hooked from the beginning words, which modesty forbids me to repeat here! This book features Jack Parlabane, an investigative journalist who is rather a rebel; in this book he gets caught up in murderous events inside the NHS. Parlabane will recur in several other novels.

My favourite Brookmyre is The Sacred Art of Stealing. This one nods to Elmore Leonard’s Out of Sight as a female cop is on the trail of a bank robber, and there is a strong attraction between them.

He won the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize for Comic Fiction with All Fun and Games Until Somebody Loses an Eye. The winner of this prize gets a Gloucestershire Old Spot pig named after their winning novel. (see photo left from Brookmyre’s website).

There is a useful glossary of Scottish terms used in his books on his website here.

ITV made an adaptation of Quite Ugly One Morning starring James Nesbitt as Jack Parlabane – I didn’t watch it as Nesbitt is not my Parlabane, I see him as more David Tennant who, as it turns out, narrated the audiobook!

This post was republished into its original place in my blog’s timeline from my lost posts archive

*Weekly Geeks appears to be no more


Leave a Reply