Author interview : Chris Brookmyre whose novel Black Widow is due out 28th January 2016

With the release of Chris Brookmyre's new book Black Widow due 28th January 2016  The Crime Warp team are extremely honoured and excited to have had the opportunity to interview the man himself.  Read on to find out what Chris told us.

Roman:  Hi Chris, welcome to the Crime Warp.  It’s great to see you here just as your new book Black Widow is hitting the bookshops.  

Chris: It’s always an exciting time for me, because when you’ve written a novel but it’s not out yet, it’s a bit like you’ve

given the feedline for a great joke but you’ve been waiting for months to deliver the punchline. Unfortunately you don’t get to be there for the moment when the reader experiences it, but at least you now it’s out there.

Roman: Let’s start with the character Jack Parlabane – 

he’s been around for what seems like ages and the centre of many of your novels – where did the idea for the original Jack come from?

Chris: I didn’t want to write a police procedural. I didn’t know a lot about police procedure and I wasn’t particularly interested in it. I was working on newspapers and magazines at the time and so I knew a great deal more about journalism. I liked the fact that it is not incumbent upon a journalist to follow the obvious path of inquiry: the police have to pursue what is dictated by the evidence, but a hack can take a flyer, which gives greater freedom in terms of where the story might go. It suited the tone of Quite Ugly One Morning to have someone who was an irreverent outsider sticking his nose into things. The original inspiration for Parlabane was Ford Prefect in The Hitch-Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy: I loved

his attitude, the way he would blithely stumble into dangerous situations and effortlessly make them worse.

Roman: Jack’s getting somewhat grey and middle aged.  With all the stresses of a life as well as the police investigation in Dead Girl Walking and the collapse of his

marriage, I’m surprised he hasn’t just given up the ghost!  Why hasn’t he – what drives him on? 

Chris: I took a big break from Parlabane for a few years, 

because when I first dreamt him up he was something of a cartoonish figure and he wasn’t the most interesting thing in the books in which he featured. He was a convenient interlocutor allowing me to explore certain subjects, and I was more interested in that than in exploring him as a character. Then after the Leveson inquiry and the impact of new media upon print journalism, I realised that his life would be in crisis and that made him more compelling to me. The thing that drives Parlabane on is the same as drives on the reader: they want to know what is really going on, hidden behind the scenes.

Roman: I’ve not read your books for a while, but recently read Dead Girl Walking, which I thought was tremendous – another unusual world for you to delve into.  What sort of research did you do for this novel?

Frightened Rabbit

Chris: I’m a great believer in creating vehicles for your passions: writing about subjects in which you are already well-versed means you don’t need to go and research them, and it usually means you will have a specific perspective on them. It is often quite conspicuous when an author has researched a subject about which they previously knew little, because we tend to do these big information dumps on the page, saying: “I’ve read all this stuff, now you bloody well will too.”

I’ve been a music fan all my days, and I’ve got to know a few musicians, such as Scott Hutchison of Frightened Rabbit and Greg Dulli of the Afghan Whigs, and this has allowed me a

more realistic perspective upon the realities of making music and touring to promote it. Some of their experiences made me think about how people throw themselves into something like that, thinking only of the music they want to create, then suddenly they’re dealing with the reality of spending months on tour in foreign countries, at close quarters with the same people every day.
I gave Frightened Rabbit a credit in Where the Bodies Are 

Buried in acknowledgement of how their music inspired me while I was writing it, but the wheel came full circle when they recorded a single called backyard Skulls, which Scott cited as being inspired by Where the Bodies Are Buried.

Roman: What I think is one of the real strengths of your writing is the way in which you switch the narrative from character to character, whilst keeping the unique voice for each and making the narrative entertaining.  How do you do this when you’re writing?  Do you write freeform or in a very planned and structured way?

Chris: I tend to write large blocks from the point of view of the same character in order to keep their voice distinct in my head, because it can be quite hard to jump from voice to voice. As a result, the books tend not to be written in the same order as the finished article. I might spend two or three weeks writing from the point of view of Parlabane, and then, as in the case of Black Widow, spend two or three weeks writing from the point of view of Diana Jaeger. I then splice these together to create a rhythm to the narrative.

In recent times I have been plotting my books very carefully. Not too much because you don’t want it to seem like your characters are on a rail, but with something like Black Widow, which is very twisty turny, if you want to misdirect the reader,

you have to control the information and be very conscious of how much the reader knows at any given time. In order to do that, you need to know where it’s all going. As a character says in the Sacred  Art of Stealing, you won’t know anything until you know everything.

Roman: Let’s turn to the main theme for the interview – Black Widow.  What was the lightbulb moment that started this novel off?

Chris: My wife is an anaesthetist and has worked in the NHS for twenty years, and saw a lot of her colleagues in the same situation as Diana in terms of giving so much of themselves to their careers. She observed a great deal of sexism in medicine, overt sexism in terms of how people are treated and spoken to, but also a more insidious, pervasive covert sexism in terms of how it is made a lot easier for male doctors to have both a career and a family. They are seldom forced to choose, or judged for their decisions. The other inspiration was the way I’ve seen women abused on social media for being even the slightest bit outspoken. I wanted to create a character who would be an acerbic and divisive blogger in order to show what the fall-out might be like for a woman who dared to stick her head above the parapet.

With Black Widow I wanted to write about how we are 

inclined to trust people early in a relationship because we are desperate for it to work out, and that can blind you to danger signs. I’ve touched upon this in previous books: how we tend to intellectually rationalise our fears in order to convince ourselves everything will be okay, when in fact we should listen when our instincts are telling us to run.

Roman: As I was reading Black Widow, I felt quite a lot of sympathy for both characters, but particularly Elphinstone.  But it’s only later in the book that you realise he’s maybe not who you think he is – yet you’ve written his character to be so utterly plausible.  How did you develop the character and is it just his inside knowledge that gives him this plausibility or is it his personality too?

Chris: It was important to create a character who would be a believable love interest for someone like Diana, and I sought to do that by making Peter complement her in ways people might not expect. I thought the things that might make them attractive to each other might be in contrast to the aspects they like least about themselves. Diana realises she’s wound to tight, is too career oriented and has forgotten how to enjoy herself. Peter is an under-achiever who wishes

he had Diana’s professional dynamism. They are two people who, initially at least, wish they had a bit more of what the other’s got, and are consequently inspired by each other. Then as it turns sour they ask themselves whether they were changing for the other person’s benefit because the other person didn’t really like what was already there.

Roman: Well, that kind of brings me to the next question.  Do you think that we’re all vulnerable to the kinds of crime committed in Black Widow?  After all there are now so many people with the technical skills to do it.  Do we just treat the books as fiction, or take away a message that we need to be careful of our dealings with people because of how technology can be misused?

Chris : The most memorable thrillers prey upon the fears we 

all share. At some point in your life you fear you will never find the right partner. Then when you do find love, you fear it might be too good to be true: you fear you may be deluding yourself about who your partner really is. Black Widow is about what happens when you ignore the warning signs and cease to trust your own judgment — because the most dangerous lies are the ones you tell yourself.

Roman: Was the ending of the novel one you originally came up with or did you explore a number of endings?

Chris: The overall revelation was conceived right at the beginning of the process, though how it was staged and ultimately revealed was refined over a number of drafts. There were ideas knocked back and forth between me and my editor as we sought to make the ending as dramatic and exciting as possible.

Roman: Which is your favourite Jack Parlabane novel and why?

Chris: This is a tough question because I tend not to look 

back at my older work too often. I love the fact that Quite Ugly One Morning is still in print twenty years later, and that it is still regarded as relevant. I also have a great fondness for Attack of the Unsinkable Rubber Ducks, because the area of investigation – the supernatural, psychics and mediums – has fascinated me down the years. I thought the book was a fun vehicle with which to debunk so much enduring bullshit, and for that reason it’s a thrill when I see it cited by people in response to someone who is credulous of all that nonsense.

Roman: I know we’ve only just seen Black Widow hit the 

shops, but can you tell us anything about what’s on the drawing board and coming next?

Chris: I have just finished the first draft of Want You Gone. There is a hacker named Buzzkill who first cropped up in my ebook novella The Last Day of Christmas and has returned for cameos in Dead Girl Walking and Black Widow. While gratefully accepting Buzzkill’s help, Parlabane

has always been suspicious of this character’s motives. He fears he can’t keep accepting favours from this dangerous individual without there being a reckoning, and the next book is about what happens when the bill arrives.

Roman: Thanks again for appearing on The Crime Warp – all the best for Black Widow and we’ll look forward to seeing what comes next.

Available on Amazon Kindle £9.99, HB £12.91, PB £7.99

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Black-Widow-Chris-Brookmyre-ebook/dp/B010RGSEP4/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1453754107&sr=1-1&keywords=chris+brookmyre