Tartan noir

Christopher Brookmyre's satirical thrillers and crime mysteries have been named "tartan noir" in tribute to the Scottish author's darkly humorous worldview and love of snappy, cinematic dialogue.

They are disrespectful, sharp and frequently achingly funny.

The arrival of his first book, Quite Ugly One Morning, in 1996, gave the reader an often stomach-churning romp through the Tories' NHS reforms packaged up as a murder mystery, as well as introducing one of his most enduring characters, cynical yet passionate investigative journo and occasional cat burglar Jack Parlabane.

Our hero's rude and hungover awakening leads him into a battle of wits with the murderous and appallingly Thatcherite NHS executive Stephen Lime, who is desperate to flog Edinburgh hospital's geriatric ward off to hotel developers - and will not let anything get between him and a tidy profit.

Although Brookmyre has based several books in Scotland's major cities, his work takes the reader around the world, with the rottweilers of capitalism, terror and bigotry satisfyingly trounced by unlikely heroes in locations as diverse as LA, France and Colombia.

Brookmyre's work not only displays a natural gift for memorable characters and dialogue but also reveals a great understanding of society and who pulls the strings - obviously a man of progressive sensibilities, his villains' evil plots are always put into the context of the society existing around them.

Brookmyre is undoubtedly the first person to weave a taut yet hilarious crime and corruption storyline against the background of post-devolution Scotland.

This is definitely an author who reads the news.

His new and ninth book - All Fun and Games Until Someone Loses an Eye - is a glorious action thriller-with-a-difference for all right-thinking people who, nevertheless, take a guilty pleasure from the likes of Die Hard and True Lies.

It features a crack team of mercenary infiltrators, ruthless arms companies, imprisoned computer experts and a fair amount of gunfire.

A scientist at one of the aforementioned arms companies goes missing, presumed kidnapped, after coming up with an idea of such potential benefit to humanity that - as the blurb puts it - "no end of powerful individuals are going to want him dead."

Our mercenaries are engaged to find and rescue him, but, first, their enigmatic, sinister and "crepuscular" leader Bett decides that, for this job, the team needs the help of a specialist.

So far, so Tom Clancy, but Brookmyre ensures that this is offset with biting humour, snappy dialogue and a wickedly subversive attitude to the conventions of the genre.

He admits that the book strayed self-consciously into "James Bond territory, but I like to think that it was more the James Bond of the Ian Fleming novels."

Aware of the possibilities of the action-thriller genre, he says: "I generally like to take the scenarios of those kind of stories and make them more human," recalling an Australian reviewer's description a few years back as a writer of "entertainment for the left," with all of the "guns and toys" of your mainstream thriller but shorn of the vigilantism and neocon sentiment.

"It's trying to say that we can have the guns and explosions, but without this simplistic morality."

Brookmyre points out that, with characters such as Clancy's Jack Ryan, they are only ever called on to "kick ass" on behalf of the elite - Ryan is never called on to unmask the shadowy organisation behind 30,000 deaths in Nicaragua, for instance.

"They exist in this moral fantasy land where there is no grey areas or US foreign policy or anything like that.

"That's why, despite writing in the genre, I will never sell to that sort of market - a lot of people want that sort of morally black and white geo-picture."

A former journalist, Brookmyre's books often betray a near-despair of the modern media and its increasing tendency to report itself, rather than the news.

It is also, he notes, one of the last institutions to pay any attention to what the church thinks about anything - particularly north of the border - hence its disproportionate voice in the media and its complicity in tabloid-sponsored "outrages."

It also leads to bizarre situations such as the coverage of the Pope's funeral, which Brookmyre likens to the death of Princess Diana - "two weeks where all sanity was suspended.

"This is all part of the media's increasing US-influenced tendency towards infantile emotionalism, rather than rationalism," he says.

"Because people are weeping in the streets, that gives a credence that excuses an absolute lack of reason behind it - the human interest "kicker story has now become the front page lead."

He also points out the media's obsession with "gaffes" and "rows," in which the most minor disagreement between two politicians within the same party is magnified out of all proportion.

"Instead of being part of the natural, healthy discourse of politics, it is 'a gaffe‚' 'a division' - leading to such obsessively 'on message' phenomena as new Labour.

"This was particularly true in the 1980s when Labour was always depicted as divided on any kind of issue whatsoever, when all you needed to do was find two different politicians with slightly different views.

"That's what caused Labour to be utterly obsessed with the way in which they presented themselves and presented policy, making everything so antiseptic that it can't be unravelled."

This was partly why the recent election campaign - and its coverage in the mainstream media - was often so dreary.

"It's all about who can offend the least people rather than who can make a statement that they are prepared to stand behind," notes Brookmyre, who voted Scottish Socialist on May 5, mainly because, with SSP representation at Holyrood, "questions get asked that would otherwise not be asked."

Brookmyre's last novel, Be My Enemy, was the first since the US declared its worldwide "war on terror" and he says that the book - which finds guests on a "motivational" weekend in the country fighting for their lives against a rogue mob of "extra-judicial" spooks and psychos - was a reaction to the "global vigilantism" unleashed since September 11.

"People are looking for really easy solutions - a sort of 'fight fire with fire' idea - and, as one of the characters says in the book, 'I don't think anyone would agree with that, least of all Red Adair."

Cliches only exist to be sent up in Brookmyre's books and, in his latest, what would normally be a weary guns'n'gadget-boy's wish-fulfilment fantasy is satisfyingly twisted, for reasons which you're just going to have to read the book to find out.

If you've read a Christopher Brookmyre book before and enjoyed it, you'll probably have rushed out and devoured all his others.

In that case, you will not be disappointed with All Fun And Games, as it ranks among the best and most entertaining of his oeuvre.

If you have yet to discover Brookmyre's intelligent and hilarious world of enraged mums with guns, ex-yuppie terrorists, hapless Glasgow gangsters, vile politicos, reluctant action heroes and grudge-bearing hacks, then do yourself a favour.

Interview by Daniel Coysh

• All Fun And Games Until Someone Loses An Eye is out now, published by Little, Brown.