Chris Brookmyre QUITE UGLY ONE EVENING (Abacus 2026)
QUITE UGLY ONE EVENING is the latest crime novel from Chris Brookmyre, who has been published for 30 years. His debut novel QUITE UGLY ONE MORNING introduced rogue journalist Jack Parlabane and was later filmed as a TV movie starring James Nesbitt.
As the title will clue you, QUITE UGLY ONE EVENING sees the return of Parlabane, desperately trying to save his career by solving a decades old murder. The journalist is in the middle of the Atlantic on board a liner hosting a convention for fans of a Thunderbirds -style TV series and the family owning the now contentious Intellectual Property are at the heart of the murder mystery.
Chris Brookmyre is a well-established author, and with plaudits from Ian Rankin, Denise Mina and Mr Cosy Crime Richard Osman on the cover, QUITE UGLY ONE EVENING will no doubt be a success. But what of the background?
The Imaginators , the TV series at the heart of the story is only briefly sketched. It's the effect it has on viewers and fans that is more important. Created by magician Neville Maskyn and his wife and partner Eliza Cooke, the puppet show was about a team of explorers transported to a fantastic landscape where the power of imagination drives magical abilities. A smash success in the 1960's, the series reached a new audience in the 2000's when it came out on DVD. This inspired a computer animated re-boot which failed. Recent proposals to "reimagine" the series in a way which can inspire the viewers of the 2020's has inspired a backlash from traditionalist fans who object to the "woke" changes. This in turn has led to a right wing venture capitalist offering to buy the property from the Maskyn heirs in order to "save it."
Parlabane goes in cynical (one chapter is titled "Ship of Fools") but experiences an epiphany when he sees a display of one of the original spaceships from the TV series and remembers his dad taking him into Glasgow to buy the toy based on it. "I'm getting a glimpse of why this has proven a new front in the culture wars. When people feel something is part of their childhood, a vital part of their personal make-up, they can become highly defensive of it."
At its heart, the novel deals with culture wars: "the culture war keeps on delivering for some people because it's not results that count: it's the taking sides. That is the purpose of the culture war (he says) creating divisions and delineations (continuing) To make this work, you need to make ordinary people perceive their fellow citizens as their enemies."
The Maskyn heirs are a multi-generational cast of suspects; we're given a family tree at the start of the novel so we can remember who is who. This is, of course, the biggest difference from Thunderbirds since Neville Maskyn and his corporation retained ownership of the rights to his characters. Crime fiction itself has its own models. Adrian Conan Doyle, for instance, who steered the rights to his father's most famous character and pioneered "sweating the brand" before the term was invented. In the end, disagreements between passionate fans and the Doyle heirs regarding the Holmes archive generated a murder mystery of its own (see 2010's The Devil and Sherlock Holmes by David Grann, regarding the strange death of Roger Lancelyn Green).
Brookmyre's writing "flows like honey" (as Arthur Christiansen would have said) and the plot is a Russian doll that goes far beyond its starting point. QUITE UGLY ONE EVENING is well worth reading in its own right, although as an 'Easter Egg' for Thunderbirds fans, there is a mention of Barry Gray buried down there.
Harry Dobermann