The Cracked Mirror by Chris Brookmyre review - 'thoroughly deserves to win prizes'

Chris Brookmyre has a remarkable ability to hold your attention, even when things start getting complicated, writes Allan Massie

Until you are about half-way through it, this seems an accomplished – if already far-fetched – crime novel. It reads easily and enjoyably, and if the two investigators – a 90-year-old lady living in a Perthshire village, and a Los Angeles cop whose partners keep getting killed – seem an improbable pairing, there have been stranger ones. You may, if you choose, see the nonagenarian Penny Coyne as a homage to Christie and the cop Johnny Hawke as the latest in a long line of LA gumshoes. Then there are the crimes they set themselves to solve, which are in the best of traditions: nasty and mysterious and rooted in the past. A screenwriter is found dead in a room locked on the inside with apparently no other possible entrance. Then, at a country house hotel, a young woman on the eve of her marriage into a rich and powerful family is found hanged in a bell tower – another apparent suicide since, once again, the door is locked and it seems there is no other means of entry. Plus, this death is apparently just like another man’s fiancee more than 20 years back. Do we have a copycat killer?

All this is quite satisfying, and Brookmyre has that remarkable ability, denied to many otherwise admirable novelists, to keep the story moving and hold your intrigued attention, even when the unlikely becomes incredible and confused. You still keep reading; contentedly, too, because in this kind of crime novel there is no crime of any disturbing significance – all blood is ketchup. So, when the boys from Police Scotland start shooting up a library in the Perthshire village and when the intrepid pair of detectives have to escape from drowning after driving into a river, and Penny has to act like a contortionist to save her life, you read on eagerly, following the intrepid two to Edinburgh in search of a manuscript or book. The pace is so hot, Brookmyre’s assurance and readability so compelling, that only the sourest of critics would hurl the book away crying “rubbish”.

When we return to Los Angeles, however, and Penny and Johnny contrive to infiltrate a technology convention, their discoveries go far beyond this old reader’s understanding. Still, Brookmyre's mastery of reader-gripping audacity holds your attention, even when you don't have a clue what any of it means. It is a rare skill to hold the attention of a thoroughly baffled reader. Suffice to say there is magic here, alternative lives and outcomes, though all, I assume, determined or made possible by star-seeking mathematics. All very good fun, but also a very long way from Miss Marple, Philip Marlowe and Lew Archer.

Chris Brookmyre

It’s an even longer way from the sort of crime novel that does more than entertain, the kind that Simenon wrote or, in a different style, PD James – novels in which murder is serious, disturbing, something that matters, even while one reads these books for entertainment and as well as for their understanding of the darkest sides of human nature. (Oddly enough, there is just such a murder in the first pages of Brookmyre’s novel, and it is resolved in the end, but only in a casual sort of way.)

Still, it is not fair to blame an author for not doing what you would have liked him to do, all the less when he has achieved the task he set himself with such verve and panache. The Cracked Mirror will sell very well and probably win prizes, and it will thoroughly deserve to do so.

The Cracked Mirror, by Chris Brookmyre, Abacus, £22. Chris Brookmyre is at the Edinburgh International Book Festival on 17 August