St Andrew's Book Festival, London reviews: Chris Brookmyre | Alan Taylor | Coineach MacLeod

Chris Brookmyre explained why his hard-boiled/cosy crime mash-up The Cracked Mirror was “the hardest thing I’ve ever written”, while Alan Taylor considered what the “point” of Edinburgh might be

Chris Brooymyre, Alan Taylor & Coineach MacLeod, St Columba’s Church, Knightsbridge, London

He had the idea walking from the Glasgow airport to the car park. The next Chris Brookmyre novel – his 29th, by the way – would, he decided, have explosions and gun battles breaking out all over a village very much like St Mary Mead. Cosy crime meets action heroics. Elderly British female amateur detective meets hard-boiled American maverick, violent, professional male homicide cop.

Put like that – “Miss Marple meets Harry Bosch” it became in the elevator pitch – it even sounds a bit obvious. But the plot behind The Cracked Mirror was, Brookmyre said, “the hardest thing I’ve ever written” as the two detectives had to a) be made to meet b) work on the same case in their own way and c) each suspect the other in the process.

​Brookmyre studiously avoided the perennial curse of meta-fiction – sending up genre clichés so relentlessly that the reader loses the plot and stops giving a damn. Instead, he reasoned, there had to be balance, respect, an avoidance of parody. The two different genre detectives would learn to overcome their mutual suspicion and work together – just as a ‘buddy cop’ movie. It works: The Mirror Cracked won the McIlvanney Prize for best Scottish crime novel two months ago.

​In a quickfire round at the end, Brookmyre was blasting through his answers right up to the point when he was asked “Edinburgh or Glasgow?” when he havered before admitting he liked both. In that respect he was unlike two elderly Glasgow women the writer and journalist Alan Taylor once overheard on a bus talking about the capital. One revealed that she’d never been there. Why not? “I’ve never really seen the point of Edinburgh,” she replied.

​So what IS the point of Edinburgh? Taylor, whose book Edinburgh: The Autobiography is a fascinating collection of stories and accounts of people who made their mark on its history, made a number of pithy observations. “It’s one of the few cities I know that rejoices in its snobbery,” he pointed out, citing the once massive social importance of having a 447 telephone code. And where else do 25 per cent of a city’s children go to fee-paying schools?

​As a stranger to the workings of much of my kitchen, I wasn’t holding out much hope of enjoying the event with Coineach MacLeod, who has parlayed Instagram fame as The Hebridean Baker into cookery book bestsellerdom. I was wrong. Although I wouldn’t go as far as the Elle magazine journalist who said that his voice “sounds how I imagine a shortbread cookie might sound if it came to life”, I have to admit that he has great charm, is impossibly handsome, and passionate without being strident about Gaelic island culture.

​A good storyteller, a fine-voiced singer, he has also had an intriguing career. Well, who else do you know who has won the Mod, has an MA in Icelandic Studies, worked on the Moscow Times, has his cookies on sale in the White House, and last week not only presented this year’s Scottish Book Awards but was voted ahead of David Tennant in The List’s Hot 100?