Crime fiction still clings to its favourite bedtime story: the lone investigator with a good brain and a better conscience, wading into the muck so the rest of us can sleep. Give them a badge, a press card, a “troubled but brilliant” backstory, and the genre starts handing out absolution like sweets. Chris Brookmyre has spent his career taking that myth apart with his bare hands, then refusing to wash up afterwards. He doesn’t write heroes who restore order. He writes people who discover—too late—that order is often the crime scene.
Brookmyre’s own temperament sits right there in the work: journalist’s suspicion, satirist’s impatience, a Scots bite that doesn’t do reverence. He writes like someone who’s watched institutions sell the public a story and then demand applause for the damage. That’s why his books move the way they do—fast, jagged, funny in a way that’s closer to anger than charm. The jokes aren’t decorative. They’re shrapnel.
Quite Ugly One Morning lands in 1996 like a kicked door, introducing Jack Parlabane—investigative journalist, professional irritant, and the exact opposite of the clean-handed truth-seeker the genre pretends to admire. Parlabane is clever, yes, but he’s also vain, reckless, and half-powered by spite. He doesn’t solve a case to restore moral balance; he digs because he can’t resist the smell of hypocrisy, and because the system keeps daring him to look away. Brookmyre makes the press-card protagonist into a problem, not a saviour. Parlabane’s victories come with collateral. His curiosity wounds people. His “truth” is a weapon he swings with messy hands.
That’s Brookmyre’s real signature: he won’t let competence stand in for virtue. He understands that “heroic investigation” is often just power dressed up as principle. Cops, journalists, lawyers, doctors—the uniform changes, the entitlement stays. Even when he writes momentum thrillers and big set pieces, the moral architecture remains rotten. The story doesn’t end with a neat reveal; it ends with the reader realising the reveal was never the point.
Brookmyre’s investigators don’t bring justice; they bring exposure, and exposure is a violent act when the world runs on keeping things covered.
He keeps sharpening that blade across his work. One Fine Day in the Middle of the Night turns a school reunion on a converted oil rig into a farce of money, grievance, and chaos, and the humour isn’t there to soften anything—it’s there to show how flimsy the social contract is when the masks slip. Later, Black Widow goes straight at online cruelty and coercion, taking the courtroom and the comment section and showing they’re cousins. The “investigation” becomes less about heroics than about watching a culture feast on a woman’s story and call it entertainment. It won major prizes because it’s wired into the contemporary disease: we’ve industrialised accusation, and we like it that way.
And when Brookmyre plays with the form, he doesn’t do it for cleverness points. The Cracked Mirror pits a Marple-ish village-sleuth vibe against a hardboiled American detective and uses the clash to expose how genre comfort works—who gets to be “cosy,” whose violence gets prettified, whose bodies get treated as plot devices. Brookmyre’s mind is restless like that: he can’t leave the machinery alone. He’s always reaching under the bonnet to show you the grease, the cheap parts, the deliberate design.
Even his collaboration as Ambrose Parry—historical crime set in 1840s Edinburgh’s medical world, co-written with his wife Dr Marisa Haetzman—fits the same psyche. It’s still about systems that call themselves progress while stepping over the vulnerable. It’s still about the stories powerful men tell to justify what they do. Different century, same racket.
The heroic-investigator myth is a comfort product: it pretends one exceptional person can outwit a system that’s designed to survive being caught.
Brookmyre refuses that comfort because he understands what it costs. It trains readers to worship “good” institutions, to believe corruption is an anomaly, to treat violence as solvable if the protagonist is witty enough. His work keeps insisting on the uglier truth: the mess isn’t a disruption of society, it’s part of the design. And if you want crime fiction that pats you on the head for believing in clean endings, don’t come here. Read Brookmyre and keep your eyes open.
