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PARTNER IN CRIME
Scottish crime-writing giant Chris Brookmyre rounds off a good year with his new novel, Places in the Darkness. Rowena McIntosh chats to the author about his latest work
Places in the Darkness takes crime i ction into space. Eighty years after the Ciudad De Cielo (‘the city in the sky’) was established, it experiences its i rst homicide. Jaded former LAPD detective Nikki Freeman is tasked with i nding the killer, under the watchful eye of uptight government worker Dr Alice Blake, who has just arrived from Earth. Chris Brookmyre’s latest is gripping, exploring the frightening possibilities of advanced technology and set among the CdC’s seedy underbelly of base human desires and police corruption, as its author explains.
Why did you decide to set a crime novel in space? I was intrigued by the idea of somewhere that is advanced and aspirational and yet permanently on the edge of existence. People are only metres away from instant death in the cold vacuum of space. I also liked the idea of being able to create my own city with its own subcultures and rules. Nobody can tell me my police procedural details are wrong if I have created my own police force. Did you already have the vivid opening image in mind when you started the book? It’s a trope of crime i ction to begin with the discovery of a body, so I thought about how the possibilities of a space station might allow me to twist that convention. I thought about the implications of a crime scene in microgravity – where the body would not just be lying in place – then realised I could take it much further.
There are no Scottish characters in this book, but there is a lot of Scotch whisky. Why was that so important to the story? It is a book about the Caveman Principle: how the more we immerse ourselves in a world of advanced technology (and in this case the further we get from Earth), the more we crave visceral human experience. Hence CdC has a massive underground economy of sex, nightclubs, i ght clubs and bootleg booze, especially single malts. Glenfarclas and Gleni ddich are prized because they have a history and a geography that connect them to the Earth. Could you be as creative as you wanted with technology? I tried to be disciplined about the possibilities of future technology, and not just invent things for the purposes of plot convenience. The most important innovation in the book is optogenetic meshes: a theoretically possible technology that has already been carried out on mice, imprinting new memories directly into the brain. The mesh allows for new knowledge to be instantly known, but opens the door for an individual’s memory to be effectively edited by someone else, which is an idea with terrifying implications.
The book has a lot of strong female roles. Do you think there is a feminist slant to your approach? I am a huge fan of [Lethal Weapon director] Shane Black, and I wanted to write a female equivalent of the buddy cop thriller. In a book showing some human weaknesses never change, I wanted to be optimistic in depicting a future where there are no longer traditional gender-delineated roles. I don’t feel it’s for me to label my own work as feminist. I think it is for women to tell me if they think it is. ■ Places in the Darkness is published by Orbit, Thu 9 Nov, and launched in association with Blackwell, Edinburgh, Wed 8 Nov and Waterstones, Glasgow, Thu 9 Nov.
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