Geek tragedy
After a slow start, Chris Brookmyre’s new thriller blossoms into a compelling page-turner, writes Joyce Mcmillan
At the centre of Chris Brookmyre’s new crime thriller stands a character who might just have a touch of the autobiographical about him. Aged 18 or so when the novel opens, in 2019, our young hero Jerry – real name Jerome – is a full generation younger than Brookmyre, who was born in Glasgow in 1968, and grew up in the nearby Renfrewshire town of Barrhead.
Yet like Brookmyre, Jerry is a lad from small-town Scotland, acutely aware of the class structures that still divide him, at least in his own mind, from some of the posher students he encounters when he arrives at Glasgow University. Just as Brookmyre has made his name in a genre – crime fiction – underrated by some, Jerry has a passionate, geeky obsession with obscure horror movies of the late 20th century, as well as with “black metal” music; and an encyclopaedic knowledge of both, that proves key to Brookmyre’s plot.
Jerry has some additional issues; he has grown up mixed-race in a small town in Ayrshire, and has just lost the loving grandmother who brought him up. In this boy, though, Brookmyre seems to have created a character for whom he feels a deep bond of sympathy, or even love; and he also paints a thoroughly affectionate portrait of the novel’s other central figure, a fit and wiry 70-year old called Millicent Spark, a former special effects make-up artist on those selfsame 1990s horror movies, who has just been released from prison after serving a 24 year sentence for the murder of her lover Marcus. Millicent woke up, one morning in the mid-1990s, to find Marcus’s bloody body beside her in bed; and now that she is free, she feels an increasing need to uncover the truth about a murder she is certain she did not commit.
What follows – once Brookmyre gets his story going – is a highly engaging road-movie of a narrative about how this unlikely couple, having somehow clocked one another as kindred spirits, end up travelling together across western Europe in pursuit of survivors from the rogues’ gallery of characters with whom Millicent was working at the time of the murder, on a neverreleased Italian horror movie with a reputation for being cursed. The story of their journey is intercut with flashback scenes set mainly aboard the yacht of the film’s producer, an inveterate wheeler-dealer called Lucio; and if the detailed twists and turns of the thriller plot are often baffling, the story’s glittering cast of stars and starlets, whores and artists, shady financial backers and dodgy politicians, is never less than intriguing.
The book’s problems lie mainly in its very slow and repetitive opening chapters, which need a few sharp strokes of the red pencil, and in its clunky and sometimes inelegant prose style; even though the narrative is in the third person, Brookmyre