CHRIS BROOKMYRE – His First 3 Novels Were Rejected But…

Mom and dad both have fairly well-developed and much-voiced sense of humour, so even though they will be sort of ranting about politics or whatever, as soon as there’s a sense that things are getting too serious, somebody, usually my dad, will inject humour into it. And I think I grew up with a view that there’s very few things that really ought to be taken that seriously, and also that more seriously, someone or something takes itself, the less seriously I’m prepared to take it.

Hello, I’m Laura Shavin, and this is The Offcuts Drawer, the show that looks inside a writer’s bottom drawer to find the bits of work they never finished, had rejected, or couldn’t quite find a home for. We bring them to life, hear the stories behind them, and learn how these random pieces of creativity pave the way to subsequent success. My guest this week is Scottish novelist Chris Brookmyre, whose 23 books have been wonderfully described as tartan noir, mixing comedy, politics, social comment and action with a strong narrative. Having worked as a sub-editor at Screen International, his first novel, Quite Ugly One Morning, was published in 1996, where it went on to win the First Blood Award for the best first crime novel of the year. 22 novels later, he has won no less than seven different awards, including this year’s Crime Writers Association Dagger in the Library Award. Under the pseudonym Ambrose Parry, he has collaborated with his wife, Marisa Haetzman, to produce two historical crime novels, The Way of All Flesh and The Art of Dying, which depict life at the cutting edge of Edinburgh medicine in the 19th century. And let’s just say there’s not a lot of just pop of paracetamol involved. Chris Brookmyre, welcome to the Offcut Store. So you write in collaboration with your wife. How does that process differ to writing on your own?

It’s a constantly evolving process. It’s something that we didn’t really know how it was going to work. And we still don’t know quite how it works. The main thing is that it does work and that we’re still talking to each other.

So when you write on your own, obviously, you’re in your own room on your own computer. But when you write with your wife, is one of you doing the pacing and the other one doing the typing or do you write separately? How does that work?

You never work in the same room. It’s a weird thing, I actually work in my office. My son is around a lot on the other computer doing sort of university stuff. And I’ve got used to another person’s presence, but I don’t think you can write with two people kind of one looking over the other’s shoulder. I know certainly a couple of writers of my acquaintance who have lived together for a very long time and they wrote a play together and they wrote it in separate rooms on separate computers which was all fine until the staging of the play. And as happens when you’re staging a play, there was a last minute rewrite required, just a brief scene that had to be changed and they were sent to a room in the theatre to write this together. And having written the thing over a period of months with complete harmony, they said that within about 20 minutes of trying to do it together on the computer they were swearing at each other. So we stay in separate rooms. The last book we’ve just delivered, the Third Ambrose Parry book, and it was an interesting breakdown of the labour in that I write by going on big long walks and I’ll dictate into my phone and normally if I’m writing on my own I’ll transcribe those ideas or dialogue and description and then expand upon it. But this time I just would do the initial transcription and then hand that to Marisa and she would expand upon it for some of the chapters. Other chapters she was just writing on her own and then I would kind of make my alterations. We tend to sort of swap over and rewrite each other’s work, but it was very efficient for me to do a lot of the walking and talking and for her to do the actual writing.

Right, well let’s get things rolling with your first off-cut. Can you tell us what it’s called, what genre it was written for and when it was written?

It’s called A Church Not Made With Hands and it’s from my first unpublished novel which was written around 1991, 1992.

I should probably warn listeners that there is very strong language in this right from the start.

Within seconds of Danny hitting the ground, Eddie was upon his assailant, pushing him with two hands and screeching almost deliriously, What was that need of you fucking animal, you nearly killed the boy. Ah fuck off you wee prick, don’t call me a wee prick you ignorant midden. This is a football park, if it’s karate you want there’s a sports centre up the road. By this time the referee had arrived on the scene, leaping between the raging little man in the tracksuit and the hatchet man. He kept them at arm’s length as their teammates began to congregate around them. Paul nursed his cut head and climbed out of the shelter more gingerly this time, trotting over to the growing melee and kneeling down beside the still figure of the striker. Danny was not writhing or moaning but was obviously in some pain and slightly traumatised. All the while the arguing went on behind them. The referee had tried to push Eddie off the pitch to calm the situation but the Caulston sweeper chose this moment of Eddie’s indignity to yell, I’m back in your box you baldy wee cunt and Eddie flew back at him. Fraser tried to restrain Eddie but was deflected into another Caulston player inadvertently butting his face. The player fell back, blood streaming from his nose and one of his teammates punched Fraser in retaliation. Eddie eluded a couple more attempts to stop him before making it to the big sweeper who slugged him powerfully with a heavy fist sending him crashing into the referee. Paul was distantly reminded of the principles of nuclear fission as one reaction set off another and so on until eight or nine players were fighting with each other while the referee and the rest of the players attempted to break it up. The fighting burnt itself out fairly quickly, partly because the principal instigators had been immobilised early in the hostilities. Eddie had missed most of it, lying nursing his jaw while his attacker lay poleaxed by a terse kick in the balls from none other than the referee. The ref had in fact given a good account of himself. After having Eddie thrown at him, he had quite definitely lost the place and had tripped two erstwhile pugilists and judo thrown another in addition to his restraining action against the big sweeper. Junior refs had to be ready to enforce the laws of the game by any means at their disposal. Weapons had never been necessary, but sometimes it was close.

A church not made with hands. For those of us who don’t understand football or Scottish football, is that a reference that we should know? It’s not a footballing term or anything.

No, not at all. It was me alluding to the fact that football had a sort of near religious status in Scotland. The title itself is actually from a song by the Waterboys. It’s the opening track on A Pagan Place, which was the second Waterboys album. And I just wanted to explore how communities in Scotland sort of relate to their football club. And junior football, just to clarify, it’s kind of like semi-professional. It’s not junior as in kids and it can get very violent. If it’s not the guys on the pitches, the fans, there was actually a junior match in the 1980s in Ayrshire where a police helicopter had to be brought in. And my dad played junior level in Ayrshire football, so he’d sort of told me all these stories that would all sound exaggerated and made up if it wasn’t actually all true. And when I wanted to write, I wasn’t someone who was ever drawn to short stories. So I never thought, you know, I’ll write lots of short stories and work my way up to a novel. I thought I’m going to essentially just write a novel to teach myself to write a novel. And I wrote this in London and probably lots of kind of evenings and weekends. My wife was working as a junior doctor and working a lot. So she wasn’t home much. So I would have a whole weekend free while she was on call. And I just taught myself essentially to write this long form fiction. But a lot of the books very naive. It’s not something I could try and polish up and rewrite now because there isn’t much of a plot. And the world has moved on in so many ways since then.

Well, you say that it’s your first unpublished novel. How many have there been?

Well, there were three unpublished novels. My official debut, Quite Ugly One Morning, was actually my fourth novel. I always maintained that I was… that there’s a long-standing prejudice in British publishing against novels that are shite. And I fell foul of this prejudice with my early efforts. They really weren’t… As I say, I was teaching myself. And the second and third novels were my attempts at crime fiction. But they were terribly serious because I thought that’s what would get published. Whereas A Church Not Weighed With Hands was largely me writing to amuse myself. And I was a kid who grew up on Roy of the Rovers. You know, I had a standing order at the local newsagent so that every copy of Roy of the Rovers was reserved. And if I went on holiday for a fortnight, you know, there’d be back copies. And there’s a huge amount of Roy of the Rovers in there. It’s a very, ultimately very romantic story about a cup run. So it’s very, very naive and embarrassingly optimistic, which is so far from what I subsequently went on to write.

Right. Time for another offcut now. Tell us about this one.

Well, this is Alsatian, an extract from a story I wrote when I first moved to London in 1989.

No one really discovered that the house had an Alsatian. It was a moment of personal realisation and subsequent horror, which each of the building’s refugees could enjoy in the privacy of their own mind. They could be alone with a dog in their imaginations, relishing the array of possible connotations and consequences that the realisation affected, before having to share their consciousness with anyone else. Shortly after that, they would be grateful that outside their own minds, they might still find someone brave enough to do something about it. For Bill, the moment was the first he might record that day. Drawing his sleeping bag around him a bit tighter, so much so that it looked like an elaborate tourniquet for a recent decapitie, he felt himself drawn to consciousness by a distant sound of barking. It was, he thought, one of those strange moments by which he had incorporated an outside sound into his dreams, before waking to find that it was the sound which had wakened him. However, the dream had made the barking sound like it was outside the bedroom door, rather than outside in the street or even up at the park. He observed happily that it was only seven o’clock and that he could pull the tourniquet that bit tighter until it threatened to actually perform the hitherto theoretical decapitation and doze both snugly and smugly, as perhaps only those who start work at ten can. Only the fragile, delicate sound of a deranged Alsatian barking outside the bedroom door upset this cosy moment. Is Alsatian the name of the story or you just called it that because it was about an Alsatian?

I’m not sure it even had a name. I think it was a fragment that even to describe as a story, it was more like an abandoned attempt at possibly a novel. I don’t know. I had moved to London in September 1989 to start working at Screen International and with nowhere to stay, I ended up staying with two people I’d known at university in Glasgow and there was three of us sharing a bed set that was supposed to be for one person. It was in Finsbury Park in a house that’s probably worth about 10 million now, but it was considerably less salubrious in 1989. I suppose I wrote that I think after I’d moved out as partly as a catharsis for how unpleasant an experience it all was and it was a true story. It was there was one morning we got up and there was an Alsatian in the house and it was all these bedsets that had locks on the doors. So we all had our own little safe little space, but there was an Alsatian, nobody knew how it got in and it was because it was rather alarmed and an Alsatian is quite a scary dog. So we were all wondering, how are we all going to get to work because nobody wanted to go out on the common stair and deal with this thing. And I remember there was two guys that shared a bed set next door, like literally the next door and one of them came out with a baseball bat as the two of them. It really came down to who needed to be at work first and because I worked at a weekly magazine, we didn’t have to be in until maybe about 10 o’clock. So we were waiting to see how it panned out and I think what happened was we reckoned that the postman had opened the door and that maybe as it swung closed, this dog had got in. But certainly these two intrepid individuals made their way downstairs and opened the door and they couldn’t find the dog. So someone must have come in and gone out from the ground floor and it let itself out. But something that I ended up putting in my novel, Big Boy Did It and Ran Away, which I didn’t tell people was autobiographical, was with the dog gone. I went downstairs to get the mail in my bare feet and as my focus was to look out for the dog and also to look out for the mail, I wasn’t looking at the carpet.

Oh no, oh no.

Yeah, bare feet.

Oh no. Oh dear.

This is why the story was a matter of catharsis.

Did you have any more of it? Did we have that moment?

No, I think I stopped before I even got to that part. It was just that when I was rooting through old boxes, I did discover this fragment, this description that would have got to that. But I think because I never got around to it and I’d forgotten about it and I did dramatise the same scene in A Big Boy Did It and ran away, including the cleaning part, which was where the hot water wasn’t running. And I must say that was not a memory I cared to revisit, but I’ve got a reputation for scatological humour and sometimes it’s purely autobiographical.

OK, moving on now, let’s have your next offcut.

Well, this is called Prey, P-R-E-Y, a screenplay I wrote in 2006 and it ultimately became my novel Pandemonium, which has in turn been adapted for a movie that might, fingers crossed, be shooting next year.

Exterior, forest, dusk. The light is dimming. The forest is starting to seem threatening rather than picturesque. Sendak and Heather are in the vanguard. Sendak looks a little concerned. He checks his compass. He also rubs his scar, which Heather notices.

War wound?

She realises this may be an insensitive turn of phrase.

Oh, sorry, I didn’t mean…

It’s OK, we’re here to talk. Finished my career, but it’s no war wound. Accident at a research facility. I was the lucky one, two of my men got killed.

Oh, I’m sorry. What happened?

Ah, that I can’t talk about, like, for legal reasons. Army bought my silence. I felt shitty taking the coin, but they made it pretty clear that if I didn’t, they’d just fit me for the blame instead. More concerned about their research than my men’s safety, that’s as much as I can say.

He checks his watch, doesn’t like what he sees.

What time you got?

Bang on.

That can’t be right. Eleven? Must have stopped.

Yeah, mine too. Eleven hundred hours. It’s got to be closer to sixteen.

But Bean, you got the time.

You got the money. Oh, sorry. Watch must have stopped, miss.

Heather looks at Sendak with amused confusion, thinking it can be made light of. Sendak doesn’t look so sure.

Fourth time this has happened out here, and look at this.

He shows Heather the compass. The needle is pointing north.

Looks OK to me.

Except that’s due south. This happened before, but the needle just went haywire. This time it’s completely flipped its polarity.

Could we have crossed some underground power lines?

Sendak gives a small shake of the head, looking away. We can see that he knows more than he is letting on. Heather glances at the ear-wigging beansie.

We’re not lost or anything.

No, I could throw him away from here blindfold, but something doesn’t feel right. Let’s pick up the pace, get everyone home.

Sendak turns to address the whole party.

Okay, people, this ain’t no country stroll. Let’s move like we got a party to get to.

So, you wrote this in 2005 as a screenplay that then became a novel and now it’s become a screenplay. Is that right?

Yeah, that’s pretty much the direction of travel. I’d written a book called Be My Enemy, which was about a siege on a country house hotel. Around about that time, there was quite a vogue for low-budget British horror films. I’d worked with Clark and Well films before. They commissioned a screenplay based on one of my unpublished novels, but they also made the adaptation of Quite Ugly One Morning with James Nesbitt and Eddie Marza and Daniela Nardini. They asked me to write an original low-budget Scottish rural set horror film, but I’ve got a bit of a thing for top secret underground military bases and I couldn’t help but put one in there, which made it a considerably less low-budget rural horror movie. And they did love the screenplay and I was hugely pleased with it because I grew up on horror movies. I was the age group that first got home video, and so when we were first able to see movies that we wouldn’t be allowed to see in the cinema, we just gobbled up what were named video nasties now. In fact, my next novel, The Cut, is very much about the legacy of the video nasties. And I wanted to write a kind of homage to those movies, the sort of teen slasher movies. But I also wanted to write about science versus superstition and religion versus philosophy and all those things. But also I wanted to just take the type of scenario that we’d be used to from American horror films, and also American comedies like American Pie. And my idea was to have a first half of this would be like a Scottish American pie where there’s a bunch of teenagers misbehaving in a way that’s really fun, and you want to know how other little plans and schemes and who fancies who, how that’s all going to play out. And then they get attacked by demons. So this very, very big change of tone. And unfortunately the vogue for those low budget horror movies had passed by the time Clark and Well films had developed the screenplay. And I kind of had a huge regret that it would never see the light of day. And when I’d finished writing a book called A Snowball in Hell, and I was thinking, what will I write next? I was out on a walk and it suddenly occurred to me, I can turn prey into a novel. So it became the novel Pandemonium. And people always ask me, what’s your favorite novel or what’s the novel you’re happiest with? And although I write mostly crime fiction, that’s the novel I’m happiest with. Writers always talk about how you start with a dream of an idea of a novel. And it’s like, I always say it’s like Plato’s cave. You know, you have the platonic ideal of the novel. And then as you write it, what you create gets further and further away from that platonic ideal. Pandemonium was the novel that was closest to my ideal. It was all the things I wanted it to be. And that’s because I had this screenplay to work from. And it kind of spawned lots of other things. It was interesting with the man who’s writing and directing the film, Gabriel Robertson. He had read the book, loved it. And they’ve been developing this now for a few years. And Gabriel’s screenplay of it is just fantastic. And pre-COVID things were starting to look very positive about shooting the film. So, fingers crossed people will get to see it and get to see all these really dodgy in-jokes that I’ve made it all the way back from the novel.

And a fair amount of gore, if I remember rightly.

Oh, God, you know, when I read Gabriel’s screenplay for the first time, I had to go back and check the novel to see if I’d actually written some of this stuff. And it was appalled to learn that I had. Because I think in the years since writing that, I had probably mellowed in terms of the type of content and the things I would do. And so I read some of these horrific deaths. And I was truly appalled at some of this stuff. And also the fact that I was playing it for labs. But as I say, it’s a great screenplay. I mean, Gabriel’s done a fantastic job of it.

Well, fingers crossed we get to see it in the next pandemic free times. Right, next off cut, please. What’s this one?

Well, this is called or I should say headlined Death Promises Life for UK Film Industry. And it’s a spoof Screen International article I wrote in 1993 while I was working there and a few of us sub-editors decided to amuse ourselves by putting together a joke edition.

Headline, Death Promises Life for UK Film Industry. London. The government this week surprised the film industry with its announcement of controversial new legislation. Under the new rules, filmmakers will be allowed to kill extras whose income falls below £6,000. This is so small you really don’t want to know, per year. The plan comes after months of begging from the industry and much hot air from government officials. The scheme is backed by the Department of Trade and Industry, the DSS, the Morticians Society and director Michael Winner. The films minister for this week, Sir Humphrey Bumphrey, said that the plan was, Really super and all my own idea. It will cost the government nothing and get all those low-life good-for-nothing scroungers who expect the government to give them a living off our backs. I’ve seen enough of their begging bulls. That’s no way to talk about British filmmakers, Ed. The Labour Party has slammed the legislation. A spokesman said, If the industry wants money, it should consider producing something that may actually attract an audience instead of yet another EM Forster adaptation. An industry spokesman described this as, Totally unreasonable. The industry has reacted with surprising speed. Winners said, This will give us something that we can really use to compete with Hollywood. They may have Arnie, but we will be able to give the audiences what they’re really crying out for, completely realistic, violent death. Already on the cards are, New Hooligan City, The Labour-Held Constituency Massacre, Soccer Stadium Bomb Nightmare, Holocaust in Hartlepool, Night of the Really Dead Dead, and a docudrama, The Herald of Free Enterprise, A Night to Remember.

I worked as a student in 1987. I worked for Scottish Gas over the summer. And one of the things I did to amuse myself, they had an in-house magazine called Gas Life. And it was very glossy and expensively produced, but it was so absurd and banal. And I spent a lot of time writing a spoof magazine called Not Gas Life. And it went down really well with all the people that were working there. And I suppose this stayed in my mind. So when I was Screen International, I think we did this when we were at the Cannes Film Festival. We would go over to Nice to cover the Cannes Film Festival. And a group of us started putting together a little spoof edition on the Apple Macs we were using at the time.

Sorry to interrupt, but if you’re enjoying the show, please do subscribe to The Offcuts Drawer, give us a five-star rating, leave a review, tell your friends about it. All that stuff’s really important for a podcast like this. And visit offcutsdraw.com for more details about the writers and actors, and to find out about future live shows. Thanks for your support. Now back to the interview. Now, comedy is something that appears in a lot of your books and is certainly referred to by reviewers. Were you funny at school? Did you have any aspiration to perform as a comedian or anything like that? Or was it just incidental?

I think it’s very much a result of growing up in a house where things weren’t taken very seriously. You know, my mum and dad both have fairly well-developed and much-voiced sense of humour. So even though they will be sort of ranting about politics or whatever, as soon as there’s a sense that things are getting too serious, somebody, usually my dad, will inject humour into it. And I think I grew up with a view that there’s very few things that really ought to be taken that seriously, and also the more seriously someone or something takes itself, the less seriously I’m prepared to take it. And I think also, as a writer, I was as much influenced by comedy as by novels. So when I was a kid, I grew up on… era before VCRs even. I used to set a cassette recorder next to my portable TV and record comedy TV shows so I could just keep playing the soundtrack back to myself. So I grew up on things like Not The Nine O’Clock News and Faulty Towers and playing these then at Porridge, playing them back to myself every night before I fell asleep. And also on Billy Connolly. And Billy Connolly, especially those early albums, were very narrative driven. Things like The Crucifixion and The Jobby Week A Story. And that narrative voice, I think, as much as anything, influenced the idiom that I drew upon when I was narrating my own work. So it always pulled towards the comical.

Right, time for another off cut now. Tell us about this one.

This is from 2011 and it’s called Bedlam. It’s a pitch for a video game which was turned into a novel and then into a video game.

Ross Baker is starting to feel a little lost. He’s at an age he is finding ever harder to describe as mid-twenties and has spent much of the preceding years cultivating his career only to find his ambitions swamped by his workload. He is employed by a company specializing in neurological scanning equipment where he works on computer software for decoding and interpreting the data. He sees potential in exploring the analogous relationship between computer and human memory structures but has enjoyed precious little time or encouragement because his line manager is only ever interested in hitting the next target. To make matters worse, his girlfriend has just dumped him complaining that he spends all his time stuck in front of a monitor either taking his job home with him or playing games. He’d say it was a fair cop on the first part but not the second as he’s just been so busy with work that he can’t remember the last time he used his PC for anything else. Either way, it’s no surprise she bailed. All work and no play is making Ross a dull boy. The flickering strip light battery farm that is his workplace is doing his head in. It’s full of vacuous twats talking shit about the X-Factor and miserable assholes who won’t shut up about asylum seekers. Just about the only people he can relate to are Jay, the stoner electronic engineer whose foibles are tolerated by management because he might just be a genius, and Todd, Ross’ fellow programmer. Unfortunately, Todd has been off work for a couple of weeks now which has led to Ross’ workload being doubled to take up the slack. It’s a welcome distraction, therefore, when one morning Jay bumps Ross up the list of volunteers for mapping trials, testing an experimental new brain-scanning technique. Ross reports to the lab and lies down underneath the modified equipment. The scanner passes over his head and his vision whites out. When the room comes back into focus, it’s not the one he was lying down in only moments before. The scanner is not a scanner, just a bed, and when he opens the door, he is no longer in the drab office building but inside a futuristic, if rather careworn and battle-scorched military facility. His confusion gets worse when he looks out of a window and observes that the sky is a fetchingly regal shade of purple. Picturesque, certainly, and a refreshing change from the usual uniform grey, but rather disturbingly, not any colour the sky has ever been on planet Earth.

Why a video game?

They asked me. That’s the simple explanation. I grew up on video games. I got a ZX Spectrum for my Christmas in, I think, 1982. And so I was part of that generation that had these home computers. And I had seen how games evolved over the years. And I then kind of rediscovered video games in the late 20s, PC games like Doom and Quake. And I put a lot of game references into my work. There’s quite a few of them in One Fine Day in the Middle of the Night. A big boy did it and ran away. It’s entirely about the early years of online gaming culture. And it developed a big following among gamers. And that, I think, was the first thing that brought my work to the attention of some video game developers. But the thing that sealed it was something we’ve just talked about, it was Pandemonium. Because Pandemonium is full of video game illusions and the sort of dramatis personae that I put at the start of the novel so that you can keep track of everybody, I split into what looks like gamer clans. And these developers in Brighton had picked up on this and they got in touch and said, would you be interested in working with us to develop a first person shooter? And this was a kind of dream scenario for me. You know, I was such a fan of first person shooters in particular and so we had conversations about how games had evolved, how the ethos of games had evolved, how the technology had changed, but mostly how our relationship with games had evolved as a society. And I had this notion in my head of writing a book that would be to video games what high fidelity is to pop music. You know, that would somehow reflect the way in which you could map experiences in your life to what games you were playing at that time in the same way as you’d remember what albums you were listening to. And these were all kind of high minded ideas, but the question was, how do you bring that into what is a very linear narrative form, the first person shooter? And this eureka moment for me was that there’s lots of stories and lots of games where someone’s transferred into some other world or even transferred into the world of a video game. But I thought, you’re always the hero. What if you were transferred into the world of a video game and you find out you’re one of the grunts that’s supposed to get killed by the hero in the first two minutes, you know? And then the other sort of hook was that as a character, you… Gamers love breaking the game. They love finding where the glitch is and where are the limits of the world they’ve been put in. And it’s one of the most exciting moments in the game Portal is when you find a crack in the wall and look behind it and realise that the game isn’t the game you thought it was. But the reason you find the crack is if you’re a gamer, you’re always looking for ways to get outside of where you’re supposed to be. And we thought, what if there’s a crack in the game, a glitch, and you escape, but you find you can only escape into another game. And I came up with the idea of this interlinked universe of games, that all the games from different eras, they’re all populated by people and that your character has to negotiate that. And this could have fairly inspired the developers.

That sounds fantastic. I’m not a gamer, but now I’m interested.

Again, though, they were a small company and it was a question of what was feasible. And I wrote them a treatment, which is what we’ve just heard from, to try and create a sense of atmosphere and also develop what kind of worlds you might explore and what the story would be. And there is a big twist in the story. But I thought, do you know, the best way to really develop this and bring character to it is write it as a novel. So I spoke to my publishers and they were very supportive. So I went off and wrote the novel and it really did kind of fly off onto the page for me. And because I was putting a lot of my own experience and my own passions into it. And the way it worked out was that the novel was published and that helped them get funding for the game. You know, that gave a certain legitimacy to the project when they were going to investors. And a couple of years after that, they did get the investment and I came back on board and I wrote the script for the game, which wasn’t exactly based on the novel, it was the same world, the same scenario, but we decided to change a few things. For one thing, we made it, the protagonist was now a woman. So I could deal with a female perspective on a very male culture as it was at the time. And it was a real eye-opener for me. It was tremendous fun, but it was a question of the art of the possible. How do you take these dizzyingly complex worlds that I’d created? Because you’ve got no budget considerations when you’re writing a novel. How do you reduce all that to something that a small team of about 12 or 15 computer developers can actually create? But they did. They did a pretty good job of it. And the game is still on Steam. I think it’s sold something like 100,000 copies, which is pretty good.

Let’s go Bedlam.

Yeah, yeah.

Right. Let’s move on to your next off-cut. This is what?

Well, this is from an interview with Terry Gilliam that I did for our student newspaper in 1988 when he was out promoting The Adventures of Baron Munchausen.

Gilliam’s next project is to be a film of the graphic novel Watchmen, which means he will be working from something already written, something he once swore he would never do. I asked him what prompted the change of heart and what attracted him to Watchmen. It was because I had run out of steam. I wanted to do something fairly quickly and normally you spend a couple of years writing and preparing a film so that by the time you get around to actually shooting the thing you are absolutely knackered. I become absolutely manic in the way I work, and every time one of my original ideas gets cut out of the film I get more and more depressed, particularly this one, Baron Munchhuson, which was like a continuing depression that got worse and worse and worse. Every day I was losing something. Preparing for something like Watchmen I was like, ah. Gilliam’s size, with the kind of welcoming look normally reserved for the guy in the middle of the Sahara with a fridge full of iron brew. He said, First of all, I’m attracted to it because I like the characters. But so much of the work has been done that I can just leap into it and maybe play with it in a lighter way. I don’t have to put several years of my life into it. I’m curious to see what happens. It’s an experiment. All the things I do are experiments. Watchmen is a metaphor for my generation. It’s all about people of the 60s, not the flower-powered druggies, but the ones who are actually trying to change things, the ones who are out marching on civil rights issues who were really trying to change or save the world but didn’t quite pull it off and suddenly they’re 40 years old. You’ve got the Ozymandias who went commercial and sold out that way. You’ve got the comedian and Dr. Manhattan who worked for the government. You’ve got Rorschach who has gone underground and gone crazy. You’ve got Night Owl who is wallowing in nostalgia. And I know all those people.

Now, I wonder if although you wrote this article well before you sort of entered the professional writing arena, I wondered if some of the points that Gilliam made in that interview now apply to you at all. I mean, firstly, you mentioned the challenges of having to change aspects of your creation. I mean, he obviously clearly found it very difficult to the extent that it sounded like it might have affected his mental health. But is that something that you recognise now?

I think I recognise it in how it’s applied to adaptations of my work. I think one of the great benefits of writing novels is you don’t have to worry about the logistics of what you’re describing. And obviously, I’d say that there’s a bit more micromanaging by editors these days. But for the most part, I’ve been very well supported by my editors during the years. They’ve not demanded that I cut things out. They may have maybe demanded that I cut to the chase a bit quicker in certain things. But I’m more relating to what Gillian was saying in terms of when people have been trying to adapt my work. When Clark and Well films made Quite Ugly One Morning, it went through so many changes and it kind of got more and more removed from my book every time you saw a new draft. And there was this absurd scenario at one point where they changed the sexuality of one of the characters, a character, Jenny DL, who was a lesbian, they made her straight and the writer was availing us of this absurd discussion he had with the BBC that they said, well, we’re already letting the script have some controversial things such as the famous jobby on the mantle piece. And they said, and also the thing is that she’s a lesbian, but her lesbianism isn’t relevant to the plot, which up to this day, I am still, I can’t believe this actually came out of the mouth of someone working in television and film production, or anywhere at all for that matter. I used to think it was like some horse trading, and it’s like, well, we’ll see your jobby on the mantle piece and raise you a lesbian policewoman. But so I can relate to that, but also I suppose it’s that sense of the lost project as well, because obviously Terry Gilliam’s latter career is littered with lost projects.

The other point he made that I wondered about for you was when he talks about his friends, his peers, about reaching the age of 40 and finding you haven’t changed the world in the way you’d once hoped to. Is that something you can relate to either for yourself or the people that you know?

I think everybody gets through that. I think that really is middle age. That’s the midlife crisis writ large. I think it’s when you’ve reached that stage in life, and I’ve been writing about it a bit of late because I always reflect on my writing, I suppose, what’s going on in my own life. And I think you’ve reached that stage in life and everything just seems to have higher stakes. When you’re younger, you don’t overthink what you’re doing because in your mind, there’s always time. And I think the older you get, the more you fear this is your last chance to do something or that you can’t afford a misstep. You know, you think, well, I can’t afford this to go wrong if it takes five years to get back to where I was. And whereas when you’re in your 20s, you take a punt on things. And it’s, I can relate to that and what Gilliam’s saying and that people can reach a stage in life and start thinking that their best years are behind them. But I think that’s a dangerous pit to fall into. My wife is always very sage on these things. And I remember her, something she’d read that she was quoting to me that we all overestimate what we can achieve in a year and we massively underestimate what we can achieve in five years or 10. And she’s a good example because she decided she’d had enough in medicine. She was very burnt out and did a masters in history of medicine. And then that led to the idea for Ambrose Parry and The Way of All Flesh. But that took us maybe about three years in total in terms of research and writing. But if you think to yourself that you’re starting to write something and if you haven’t got a return on it in a year, then you have to abandon the project. Whereas she took a long term view and thought this might take five years to create something, but it will create a base from which we can build. So it meant that the subsequent Ambrose Parry novels don’t require years and years in between them.

OK, time for your final offcut now. Can you tell us about this one?

Yeah, this is the synopsis for my novel One Fine Day in the Middle of the Night, a synopsis I wrote in 1997.

Hotelier Gavin Hutchison understands people don’t like anything foreign at the best of times. They certainly don’t want to be bothered with it when they’re on their holidays. He has therefore envisaged a new kind of holiday resort, one where visitors can enjoy the sun and sea in warmer climes, surrounded by all the cultural comforts of home, with no Spanish tummy, no crime, and absolutely no danger of finding a German beach towel draped imperialistically over your sun lounger. In Nigg Bay on the Murray Firth, Gavin realizes his vision. A disused oil platform, purchased for the nominal fee of one pound, has been undergoing a slow, complicated and expensive transformation into a luxury leisure complex. Accommodations, swimming pools, bars, restaurants, cinemas, sports facilities, even an ice rink. Advance bookings have been slow, dead slow, and Gavin decides to cheer himself up by realizing another long-planned ambition, to host a high school reunion, and where better than on board his nearly completed facility? Giving little consideration to the wisdom of taking 40 or 50 people who don’t like each other and assembling them in a confined space, Gavin sends out his invites and makes every preparation for what he’s sure will be the night of their lives. But Gavin’s not the only one planning to make the party go with a bang. One fine day in the middle of the night will tell the heartwarming story of what happens between dusk and dawn when the former pupils of St Matthew’s Roman Catholic Secondary are reunited after so many years. Nostalgia, rekindled passions, terrorist insurgence, toxic waste, rocket-propelled grenades, that sort of thing. Those wishing they were somewhere else will include Matt Black, notoriously dark comedian and hate figure of the Scottish tabloids. Davy Murdoch, reformed psychopath with a conscience who may have to revert to former ways if he wants to see his family again. Simone Darcy, good pupil, good wife, good mother, about to discover a long-suppressed appetite for the less wholesome. And Timothy Vale, Hutchison’s hired security consultant who may have found a way to salvage his interrupted Highland shooting holiday. After the lofty ideals and sensitive characterization of Not the End of the World, I feel the need to redress the balance with something fairly reprehensible. This novel will therefore have a pace somewhere between hectic and mayhem, complemented by humor bordering on the irresponsible. With the action taking place in one night, I intend to keep the thing tight, if bloodily messy, and envisage it weighing in at 80,000 to 100,000 words. You might want to phone Ismael Merchant and James Ivory now regarding the film rights. Christopher Brookmyre.

So, that was a synopsis of the book. How close is it to the finished article?

It’s surprisingly close, actually, hearing that. As the synopsis says, I had written a book called Not the End of the World, which was quite heavy in a lot of ways, and I was also just approaching turning 30, I think we had the idea for it, and hearing it back, one of the things that strikes me there is me projecting that I’ll bring it in at about 80,000 words, which is something my wife always laughs at, she says every time I say a word count, it’s always much more than that before I finish the book, but One Fine Day in the Middle of the Night did come in at just a little over 80,000 to 90,000 words, and it is tight, it is very, very hecticly paced, so it’s the book that I sometimes or probably most look back and think, I wish I was writing that one again, because it was huge amounts of fun to write. I think I just got the tone right, a tone that allowed me to have a lot of fun and mayhem, but at the same time create characters that weren’t cartoonish, you know, they were archetypal to some extent, in that I wanted to show all the type of people you might have known at school, that they would be recognisable, but there would be enough flesh on them that you didn’t feel like they were stereotypes. So it’s the book that I tend to recommend to people who have not read me before, because it’s short and it’s humorous and it’s just got a great sense of fun and escapism about it. I actually called it One Fine Day in the Middle of the Night after the Nonsense Rhyme, but it’s also kind of a love song to 80s action movies and I did at one point toy with calling it Good Guys Get Shot in the Shoulder, because in all those 80s action movies, the good guy always gets shot in the shoulder and there’s actually a rant in the book at one point about that. So, it’s my kind of pay on to the Arnold Schwarzenegger Stallone movies of the 80s.

I was going to actually ask you about the title because it is a great title, it really stands out and looking through your list of books, you have quite a few very memorable titles in your oeuvre. All Fun and Games Until Somebody Loses an Eye, which made me laugh, A Tale Etched in Blood and Hard Black Pencil and Attack of the Unsinkable Rubber Ducks. How important is the naming process? Does it take very long or do you name them before you write them and then write to the title?

I certainly used to name them before I started work. I think with something like One Fine Day in the Middle of the Night or All Fun and Games Until Somebody Loses an Eye, having a title like that at the head of the document is a constant reminder of the sort of energy and tone that you’re looking for. But in a way it feels like a different age of publishing because back then I could come up with these bizarre titles and my publisher loved that and publishers now are for various reasons are a lot more conservative about that kind of thing and I think it’s because the market has changed. You need a title that people can read on a thumbnail because they might be browsing on their phone or a tablet. They’re not looking at it in a bookshop so it makes that a bit trickier. I mean I remember when I proposed All Fun and Games Until Somebody Loses an Eye, there was a running joke going round the publishers that every time any of them passed Graham Spilling who was the cover designer, they would all say you poor bastard because they knew they had to try and fit all of that and my name onto the cover. But I think even as a kid when I was writing short stories at school, I would always come up with what I thought were strange or intriguing titles because the title is your first chance to engage the reader. Latterly I’ve had all sorts of wranglings over titles so my next book is called The Cut and it was written under the title Final Cut but while writing it one day I looked on Twitter and there was SJ. Watson saying that his book was going to be called Final Cut and it was coming out in August and so he’d beaten me to it. But when I was writing A Tale Exed in Blood and Hard Black Pencil that wasn’t the title of that book. What happened was I wanted to call that book Peter Pan Got Shot Down Over Paisley because it’s a book about school days and sort of dealing with the ghosts of your youth and unfortunately Peter Pan is a registered trademark so the publishers were a wee bit wary of that but I’d come up with a strapline of A Tale Exed in Blood and Hard Black Pencil so we said we’ll just use the strapline. So that was the occasion when a strapline got me out of trouble. With Big Boy Did It and Ran Away it got me into trouble because my strapline was Terrorism It’s the New Rock and Roll which was fine when I wrote the book in early part of 2001 but the publication date was like Fortnite after 9-11 so they had to re-jacket the entire print run.

Oh gosh, right well final question, are there any offcuts you’ve still got hold of that you haven’t shared with us today?

For one thing I’ve got two novels in a drawer that I haven’t shared.

So you’ve still got hold of them but of the three, I mean obviously you sent us the first one which was probably the most relevant as it was your first attempt but any other reason why it might be preferable to the other two that you’re still holding on to?

I think mostly because it’s closer to the type of thing that I went on to write in that the idiom, the tone, it’s very humorous and warm whereas the two subsequent novels I wrote were my early attempts at crime fiction and part of the reason they failed was they were just too serious. I got a publishing deal with Quite Ugly One Morning so my natural idiom was always to write in a sort of irreverent way and it took me a while to realise that you could bring that to crime fiction.

Well it’s been lovely to talk to you Chris Brookmyre. Thank you very much for sharing the contents of your offcut straw with us.

Oh, it’s been a real pleasure.

The Offcut Straw was devised and presented by me, Laura Shavin, with special thanks to this week’s guest, Chris Brookmyre. The offcuts were performed by Christopher Kent, David Monteath, David Holt, and Emma Clarke, and the music was by me. For more details about this episode, visit offcutsdrawer.com, and please do subscribe, rate, and review us. Thanks for listening.