A Snowball in Hell - Christopher Brookmyre

If he was made of chocolate, he'd eat himself. (566 words)
by mogdred - written on 01/11/09 (Very useful, 158 readings)
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"If he was made of chocolate he'd eat himself" - so Angelique de Xavia says of Simon Darcourt, villain of both " A Big Boy Did It and Ran Away" and "A Snowball in Hell". Brookmyre brings back characters from several earlier works in this novel - Angelique de Xavia, Glasgow policewoman; Simon Darcourt, the egotistical terrorist maniac and Zal Innez, erstwhile bank robber and budding magician. "A Snowball in Hell" is in some ways a vicious indictment of what our society has become. Brookmyre takes the cult of celebrity and takes the piss out of it and its effect on our society. The book switches between the three main ...

A Tale Etched in Blood and Hard Black Pencil - Christopher B ...

Christopher Brookmyre's Schooldays (698 words)
by andrewl - written on 13/07/07 (Very useful, 72 readings)
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I m not a big fan of crime novels, but with Jasper Fforde and Christopher Brookmyre making such consistently brilliant efforts at subverting the genre, my resistance is being eroded fairly swiftly. Christopher Brookmyre has established a formidable reputation for Scottish crime thrillers. Full of bodily fluids and lurid characters, they re generally hilarious to read, but shot through with such extreme violence that there s no chance of them ever being left in the humour section. A Tale Etched in Blood and Hard Black Pencil is told entirely in the present tense, and follows two linked story strands - the progress through school of a group of Scottish children from ...

A Tale Etched in Blood and Hard Black Pencil - Christopher B ...

Have A Translator Handy (1095 words)
by kenjohn - written on 16/12/06, updated on 16/12/06 (Very useful, 485 readings)
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~ ~ I’ve been a fan of the Scottish author Christopher Brookmyre ever since I read one of his early books “Boiling A Frog” a few years back. His irreverent style of writing and his constant use of Scots vernacular in his prose appeals to me, although how someone not schooled in the intricacies of Scottish slang ever manages to wade their way through one of his books is as much a mystery as some of the crime/comedy novelist’s yarns. (Hence my title) ~ ~ Brookmyre has been feted as one of the UK’s finest novelists ever since his first novel, “Quite Ugly One Morning” (1996) won the “Critics First Blood Award” for “Best First Crime Novel of the Year”. He followed up this ...