Interview: Christopher Brookmyre, author

A CRASH and a shower of glass as a huge window is shattered by a ghoulish flying object. "Lying on the floor, sticky and glistening amid the thousands of tiny blinking fragments, is Dazza's head."

So take that as a warning. And not just of the dangers involved in encountering the forces of hell, as a group of Glasgow teenagers do in Christopher Brookmyre's latest novel, Pandaemonium.

Because Dazza, aka Daniel McIntyre, one of the pupils from a Catholic high sent on a retreat to help them recover after the murder of a school mate, is also a real person. He and Deborah Thomson, in the book another of the pupils, won the chance to have their names immortalised in a Brookmyre work in an auction to raise money for the Edinburgh Aids charity, Waverley Care.

It's not the first time the 40-year-old so-called "Tartan Noir" author has raised cash for charity in this way but he does always give the winners a caveat: "I warn them: You might not like the character or what happens to them," he chuckles.

And it's not the last – currently on the promotional beat for this latest novel, his 13th, Brookmyre, a former Evening News sports sub-editor, is due to settle down in the next few weeks to begin work on his 14th. And the chance to be a character in the novel is again up for grabs, also in aid of Waverley Care.

In the meantime, though, it's Pandaemonium which is occupying his time. The book represents a bit of a departure from his previous work. Crime has been left behind in favour of a tale about demons escaping from a secret underground US base in the remote Scottish countryside.

But he says: "I didn't have any concerns about the change in genre. I don't think people were buying my books because they were into crime fiction."

No, they are more likely to be reading for his "skewed", as he puts it, vision of the world, his wit and his rich use of language. Pandaemonium was originally conceived as a screenplay for the makers of Quite Ugly One Morning, one of Brookmyre's novels which was made into a TV drama.

"It was about five years ago and there was a lot of interest in making small British horror movies. They wanted a low budget horror story, of course I had to put in a secret underground military base, which drives the price up. They tried very hard to get it delivered but they couldn't."

But the ideas he'd been hoping to explore "gnawed" away at him – questions such as science versus religion and the possibility of parallel universes.

His interest in such philosophical dilemmas has arisen from his reading of late, such as cosmology consultant Marcus Chown's We Need to Talk About Kelvin and Quantum Theory Cannot Hurt You .

It's hard to believe he has time to plough through such tomes, the rate he churns his own out – so far it's been one a year since 1996. But Barrhead-born Brookmyre insists there's a very simple reason for his disciplined writing these days – his nine-year-old son, Jack. "If you are dropping your son off at school and picking him up, you've actually got less than six hours to work."

Serious thinking about the next chapter means a short walk – these days to the castle in the South Lanarkshire village where he lives, in his Edinburgh time, a dander up McDonald Road and Leith Walk towards Canonmills.

Mostly it's just him and the computer, though. "A rock band can tell you about an art deco studio in Prague they hired," he says, almost apologetically. "Actual writing is a bit boring."

More entertaining, certainly for an audience, will be one of his gigs with his singer/songwriter buddy Billy Franks on Tuesday in Dunfermline. He generally helps out with the backing vocals on the last song, Bunch of C***s. "It's great getting staid Edinburgh audiences singing along at the top of their voices," he says.

It's not the only time his sometimes rich use of the vernacular has got a surprising reaction from an Edinburgh crowd.

A book festival regular, his earlier appearances at Charlotte Square, when he was less well-known, tended to be held jointly with another writer.

Pandaemonium is published by Little Brown, priced 17.99. Christopher Brookmyre is appearing at Dunfermline's Carnegie Hall with Billy Franks on Tuesday at 7.30pm. Tickets, 3, available on 01383 602302.02.