Female cop falls for smart sexy
bank robber, and her investigation rapidly evolves into mutual
flirtation. If this sounds familiar, it's because it's Elmore Leonard's
Out of Sight. Much the same, though, happens in Christopher
Brookmyre's The Sacred Art of Stealing, with the action
transplanted to Glasgow, and the bankrobber given a few extra quirks,
such as a tendency to keep his hostages amused inventing captions for The
Scream and Raft of the Medusa. As things turn out, he may be
the robber but he's not the bad guy, though there's no shortage of those
around. |
Brookmyre is not the most disciplined of writers; the first
robbery, which would have made a great opening, gets into gear round
about page 80, prior to which we have 11 hardly crucial pages on why DI
Angelique de Xavia is a Rangers fan, and a further 6 on what happened at
the bank's Christmas party the night before the raid. And while
reviewers frequently call him a satirist, the word carries connotations
of subtlety of which Brookmyre can't seriously be accused-he never makes
one joke on any topic when he can make three, and his approach smacks
more of the shovel than the stiletto. |
This makes it sound like I don't approve. In fact, I always enjoy
his books-he's immensely readable, very funny, and much better (and far
more humane) than Hiaasen, with whom he's usually compared. It's true
that these 400 pages could have been 300, and made a better thriller.
But with Brookmyre, that's hardly the point. Editing might have racked
up the tension, but it would have lost a lot of what makes him worth
reading, and I'm not just talking about the jokes. Brookmyre has a
highly developed sense of social justice, and his shovel is always
wielded in a noble cause. Though his vitriol covers a wide range of
targets, his antipathies boil down to a simple thesis: he doesn't like
bigots. People, he's fond of, and that's the main reason for the sprawl
in his books. When he takes a detour here to tell us about the bank's
Christmas party, it's so we'll care what happens to Michelle, the bank
clerk caught up in the raid. |
As for the robberies themselves, they're exciting and satisfyingly
clever; the plot twists live up to the blurb ("Prepare to be misled");
art in general gets a good look-in, and there's a nicely sly allusion to
Robertson Davies' What's Bred in the Bone. Brookmyre is one of
the select few whose work openly acknowledges American roots without
descending into slavish imitation (Scots crime writers in general score
high on this). As for the similarities to Leonard, well, there are only
so many plots out there. And this is at least as much fun as the
original. |
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