srw
It's a bit more complicated than that...
One of the best contemporary novelists you may well not have heard of. He can do subtle, filigree writing when he wants to. He can do scabrous, over-the-top filth that would make Will Self in his drugged-up period blench. He can do laugh-out-loud comedy just when you least expect it. He's a brilliant satirist, skewering difficult targets as well as the obvious easy ones. His books are structured as thrillers, and work impeccably as thrillers; but there's an awful lot more to them than that.
I'm about half way through the books now. They're all worth reading, but for present company I'd pick out two.
The Sacred Art of Stealing is an in-depth discussion of the philosophy of art structured as a comedy detective novel. Be my enemy is a forensic dissection of the short-sightedness of political extremism of all kinds set in the world of corporate team-building gone wrong. I'm grateful to that latter book for a quote from Betrand Russell: “The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, but wiser people so full of doubts.”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christopher_Brookmyre
Extracts here: http://www.brookmyre.co.uk/
I'm about half way through the books now. They're all worth reading, but for present company I'd pick out two.
The Sacred Art of Stealing is an in-depth discussion of the philosophy of art structured as a comedy detective novel. Be my enemy is a forensic dissection of the short-sightedness of political extremism of all kinds set in the world of corporate team-building gone wrong. I'm grateful to that latter book for a quote from Betrand Russell: “The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, but wiser people so full of doubts.”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christopher_Brookmyre
Extracts here: http://www.brookmyre.co.uk/
