ONE of the commonest pitfalls facing first time authors - for brevity's sake let's call them FTAs from now on - is the curse of explication. It goes something like this: a rattling good narrative is suddenly interrupted because the FTA suffers a spasm of panic and thinks, "My God, they won't have a clue about what's going on, I'd better stop and explain."
There then follows a long, involved and stodgy piece telling the reader what, if he or she is in any way perceptive, has already been gleaned. Or it can be a nicely formed bit of research which the FTA is especially fond of but which has no particular relevance to the plot: this has to go in, no matter how indigestible it may prove to be to the steadily more impatient reader.
Although not rampant, this disease has insinuated itself here and there into Christopher Brookmyre's first effort, causing it to drag to the point where this reader, at least, had the desire, metaphorically speaking, to kick it. Quite Early One Morning - nice title - begins most impressively with a grand guignol scene of blood and slaughter in an Edinburgh flat. A man - medical doctor Ponsonby, as it later turns out - has been done to death in a most frightful fashion, and the police have Just arrived to pick up the pieces.
Enter Jack Parlabane, an investigative journalist, who has been nursing a hangover in the apartment above the despoiled one. While the coppers have their backs turned, he sneaks in and does a quick reconnoitre, finding, among other things, a giant "keetch" - Scots slang for turd - on the mantelpiece.
He is discovered by female police person Jenny Dalziel - lesbian and proud of it - and they form a loose kind of alliance in order to pool information and resources. One of the points of reference that Jack is soon on the trail of, is the late Ponsonby's estranged wife, Sarah, also a doctor and now going under her catchy maiden name of Slaughter.
Her entrance gives rise to one of these explanatory pieces that only slows down the pace of the novel: a lengthy dissertation on the lot of junior doctors at the mercy of their more senior colleagues. A worthy subject and one that needs attending to, no doubt, but not here and not at such length.
Notwithstanding this, the plot continues to unfold, and we are introduced to the villains of the piece, one Stephen Lime a Sydney Greenstreet smoothie - and his hulking accomplice, Darren Mortlake. Lime is operating a hospital scam that involved Ponsonby practising euthanasia on old people, while Darren, who, in the best Carl Hiaasen fashion, loses various bits of himself over the course of the tale, attends to the strong-arm stuff.
Jack, Sarah and Jenny get on the trail - the plot explication this time demanding reams of stuff about computers - and in a suitably bloody climax, a resolution is achieved. We are not told what happens to Darren - selling what's left of himself to organ transplant people? - but Lime meets his apotheosis in prison when someone called "Big Boabby" takes a fancy to him.
Christopher Brookmyre was born in Glasgow, but seems to have grown out of it, if references to that city in the text are to be taken as evidence. In the fashion of a number of modern-day Scottish authors, he writes a tough, in-your-face type of prose that does not shy away from the less pleasant aspects of life. His novel is studded with a lot of black humour, and in Parlabane he has created a nicely amoral hero for our times. No doubt we'll hear from him and his creator again. Next time, though, maybe more of the clip on the ear and less of the let's sit down and discuss it business. Gallop, my boy, gallop.
