Seven varied individuals receive invitations to a high-end resort on a private island. Lucky them, you may think, until one disappears and fellow guests realise they have stumbled into a sinister trap.
From such a pitch, fans of crime legend Agatha Christie should be instantly reminded of her much loved nail-biter And Then There Were None.
In fact, this is the plot of the latest novel from Tartan Noir veteran Chris Brookmyre.
Ill-fated hen weekend
One of Scotland’s leading thriller writers has returned with The Cliff House, the tale of an ill-fated hen weekend on a Scottish isle near Barra: an attendee is taken hostage, facing the rest of the party with an awkward ransom demand.
With his latest novel out next week, Chris is due to appear at St Andrews’ Waterstones bookshop, before a more informal signing at the chain’s Dundee branch en route to a slot in the spoken-word tent at Belladrum Tartan Heart Festival, Inverness.
Speaking to the Courier from his Bothwell home, he admits to being inspired by Christie’s plot, though from its recent TV adaptation rather then the 1939 novel.
“I can’t imagine anything further from my own world view than Agatha Christie. I’ve never read of any of her books,” he laughs, though engrossed by the BBC three-parter,
Chris twisted the original story where an unseen killer targets the visitors to punish them for crimes from which they evaded justice.
“In a way it’s my inversion of And Then There Were None, it goes in a different direction.
Confess or die
“This story is about a bunch of women who have all got secrets, who have all done something fairly unforgivable to somebody – and in a lot of cases someone who’s actually with them.”
Instead of being knocked off one-by-one, the women are told the hostage will be killed unless one of them confesses their awful deed. Except the message fails to specify which hen, when all have something to hide.
“So the moral dilemma is would you let someone else die to protect your terrible secret,” the Glasgow-born author says with the relish of someone that has spent 25 years putting protagonists through terrifying and painful challenges.
It’s also about friendship
Yet while he acknowledges The Cliff House is a tense page-turner full of peril and suspense, Chris describes his latest novel as “fairly good-hearted”, something he reckons applies to much of his output.
“At the end of the day it’s about friendship and forgiveness. I’m usually far more optimistic in my work than people sometimes think. There’s always dark humour, but people assume crime fiction is always going to be bleak and my stuff is not very ‘noir’, even though that term is applied to it all the time.”
Such positivity comes partly from the backgrounds of his central characters: rather than hard-boiled private eyes, cynical detectives or amateur sleuths, they are often ordinary people who unexpectedly have to cope with extraordinary problems.
“That’s what we want when we read a book,” he explains.
“The escapism of being able to put ourselves into that situation. If you thought the only sort of person that could survive would be a soldier or a trained police officer, it wouldn’t be as easy to relate to it.
The overlooked and underestimated
“I always like to write about people that have been overlooked or underestimated, because we tend to do that to ourselves – those of us who aren’t running for the Conservative Party leadership – not give ourselves credit for things we’ve learned in life or how valuable our trades are.
“It is quite restrictive to think crime fiction should always be about police procedure. I’m interested in people from all different walks of life, though in my case, it came from not knowing anything about detective work and not being that interested in it. People can always do that better than me.”
Happy with the label
Having said that, Chris is comfortable being labelled as Tartan Noir, alongside such names as Ian Rankin and William McIlvanney.
“I wouldn’t be precious about it. Anything that helps people find your work is to be embraced. We’ve got this bounteous variety of sub-genres within crime fiction in Scotland that are all covered by the term.
“A lot of them aren’t really noir, such as my own, but if you say “crime” that doesn’t cover it either, because that includes more sleuthing.
“It’s fascinating to find you’re writing about the same cities, characters or scenarios, and yet no two Scottish writers will have the same take on that. That’s why it’s such a rich genre at the moment: you’ve got so many vivid and distinct styles and voices. You could give two writers the same story and you’d get two completely different books.”
Bloody Scotland this year
Chris points to a panel he is due to appear on this September at the Bloody Scotland international crime writing festival in Stirling.
Three thriller writers have books out this summer set around parties or gatherings – alongside Chris there are Lin Anderson (The Party House) and Claire Mackintosh (The Last Party).
“I haven’t read the others, but I imagine we’ll all be radically different from each other. Different perspectives and voices are going to give you markedly distinct pieces of writing,” he predicts, agreeing this coincidence could be a reaction to the pandemic.
“When you’re trying to anticipate the world your book’s going to be released into, we weren’t sure how things would be and we were creating social bubbles. Maybe that’s what we responded to: the idea of a self-contained environment for a story to unfold in.
“Also not seeing friends probably played a part. Being isolated for so long gave me a lot of time to think about friendship, the people I was missing.
“The book deals with different levels of those relationships; the people who you see all the time, but you’re not particularly intimate with, then there’s those you see only every five or six years, but the minute you’re back in their company it’s like you’ve never left.”
24 novels and counting
Since his 1996 debut Quite Ugly One Morning, Chris has published 24 novels under his own name with little sign of slowing down, a formidable effort he puts down to values instilled in him by his parents.
“I always say I had a bad combination of Catholic guilt and Protestant work ethic, by parents being from two different backgrounds,” he says ruefully.
“Parenthood also did it. For years it was a struggle to fit work around childcare duties, but once they don’t need you so much you forget what else you used to do with your time.”
A writer wife too
Chris also enjoys a productive relationship with his wife Marisa Haetzman, a former anaesthetist, writing three titles of a historical series under the pen-name Ambrose Parry, with the fourth close to completion, plus they are working on a TV adaptation of his last novel The Cut.
“Working together has been the thing that has got us through the past couple of years. I keep talking about the great patter drought of 2020 when nobody had anything to talk about, but fortunately we had something to discuss all the time.”
Now, though, Chris is relieved to be on the road meeting fans, with key contributions to come at Bloody Scotland.
He’s playing guitar at its highly anticipated Crime at the Coo talent show, its first since 2019, with a cameo in the England v Scotland five-a-side football.
He and Marisa are also due to deliver the keynote lecture on their collaboration.
Fun Lovin’ Crime Writers
Elsewhere, he is set to perform at Bute Noir in Rothesay and the Fringe with Fun Lovin’ Crime Writers, the musical outfit formed with fellow wordsmiths Mark Billingham, Luca Veste, Doug Johnstone, Stuart Neville and Fife’s own Val McDermid.
Although Chris has always relished appearing at festivals, libraries and bookshops, the past couple of years have reinforced the importance to him of such events.
“You spend all your time creating something, but are not present at the moment the reader experiences it. These moments are the closest I get to that, which was the hardest thing about the pandemic for me.
“My ability to do the day job was not badly affected, but all the fun stuff was taken away – and,” he adds with a final dry chuckle, “it was then I realised how much my social life revolves around book events.”
- An Evening with Chris Brookmyre, Waterstones St Andrews July 28, ticketed; signing at Waterstones Dundee July 29.
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