Pop Pulp
Quite
Ugly One Morning
Paranoid crime thrillers may be the last venue in which journalists are portrayed as out-and-out heroes. It's not instantly clear how much heroism Christopher Brookmyre wants his readers to see in Jack Parlabane, the central character in Quite Ugly One Morning, but suffice it to say that Parlabane is the sort of journalist who can scale walls, photograph incriminating documents with his spy camera and crack corporate computer systems. He's the sort of journalist who is so gifted in exposing the skullduggery of the various evil parties who secretly control the world that they literally want him dead. He's the sort who can gauge, at a glance, the relative skill with which a murdered man's throat has been slashed — and he can do so despite a terrific hangover.
Quite Ugly One Morning is a lean, nasty, fun little page-turner that unfolds in a world where such abilities can come in handy. This is Brookmyre's first novel; it was published in England in 1996 and won the British First Blood Award for new crime fiction. Brookmyre, who is 33, has since published four more novels, but this is only the second to appear in the United States. (The first was last year's Not the End of the World.) Although Brookmyre is Scottish, his aesthetic seems to have been hard-boiled, American style. Or maybe it's more accurate to narrow the influence to Los Angeles — not the actual city, but the idea of Los Angeles, as both a source of and backdrop for popular pulp, black-and-white morals and Technicolor violence. His characters tend to talk like they've read a lot of Elmore Leonard and seen a lot of Quentin Tarantino.
Parlabane is a young, wiry little Glaswegian who favors black jeans, Guinness and a somewhat thudding strain of sarcasm. (As in: ''Your move into sports reporting hasn't blunted your keen powers of journalistic observation, McLean.'') On the other hand, he's a proper liberal, neither sexist nor homophobic, and the sort of guy who doesn't make even smart remarks about a doctor named Slaughter, because he's so sensitive. As a reporter, he's attracted to taking on corporations with nasty environmental policies. Thus he made dangerous enemies in England, then moved to Los Angeles, where he made enemies who were even more dangerous. So he's fearless and sexy, but he's P.C.
This is relevant, because Brookmyre's baddies have appalling politics. In Quite Ugly One Morning the chief villain (although the method and scope of villainy takes a while to unfold) is one Stephen Lime, a crooked Tory executive who runs one of the trusts designed to force some free-market efficiencies into Britain's National Health Service. (The main heavy in Not The End of the World is a virulently right-wing religious broadcaster, and his allies include a Republican senator and a militia group.) Lime is also so unattractive that women will sleep with him only for his money, and if you're not getting the picture yet, he's overweight and flatulent too. But what concerns us here is that his real motivation is his own bottomless greed, and he has some extremely novel ideas about just how ruthless health care cost-cutting can get.
Parlabane's partner in figuring out the complicated links between his deceased neighbor and health care reform is the aforementioned Dr. Sarah Slaughter. She and Parlabane have a lot in common, worldview-wise, and American readers can substitute ''H.M.O.'s'' to get the basic populist flavor of her critique of the trusts. These trusts, she says, ''only care about pounds, shillings and pence, and that's why they were set up in the first place, and filled with accountants and bankers and a whole legion of gray zeroes in suits.'' Dr. Slaughter is also attractive, and available.
Happily, the vast right-wing conspiracies that define Brookmyre's universe serve a function that has more to do with narrative than with ideology. (And it can be read as one universe: a pal of Parlabane's from Los Angeles resurfaces as a main character in Not the End of the World.) Whatever Jack Parlabane's politics, his most salient characteristic is that he's a ''catastrophe magnet.'' The same was true of Steff Kennedy, the Scottish photographer who was the main hero of Not the End of the World. Brookmyre's books are all about broad humor, splatters of dialogue, gross-out violence and its aftermath (there's a surprising amount of vomit in Quite Ugly One Morning) and breakneck plotting. The important thing is to make sure the stakes keep rising, and a great way to do that is to make the conspiracy bigger and darker than even the cynical hero suspects. In a thriller, an implausible scene or a cartoonish character can be annoying — but dullness is unforgivable. Brookmyre's universe is not dull.
That isn't to say that his first book wouldn't have benefited from more subtly drawn characters, or the deletion of groaners like ''Houston we have a problem.'' But maybe paranoid crime thrillers are a bit like murders: they can be carried out with the skill and aplomb of a creative masterpiece, or they can be a little messy. Perhaps the practiced eye will appreciate the difference. In the end, though, the deed either gets done or it doesn't. In those admittedly ugly terms, Brookmyre certainly delivers.
This review appeared in the March 3, 2002, issue of The New York Times Book Review.
