Chris Brookmyre

There's a crime.

There's witnesses.

But none of the witnesses agree on what these voices are like.

Yeah, I think it's slippery.

It's got a supernatural element, potentially.

And it's set very firmly in the time in which it's written in the 1950s.

Yeah.

It's a very darkly comic novel.

It's a great kind of showcase for the very waspish, concise language that Spark uses in describing the characters or even that she puts into their mouths.

The word crisp does come to mind a lot.

If I have a problem with it, it's actually the same thing that makes those characters memorable, that makes them jump off the page, is that she's not remotely sentimental about any of them.

She causes you to shift your sympathies quite a lot because you're never allowed to get that close.

They can seem a little cold because she's very cold towards them.

But what I do love about it is that

it sticks to its theme rigidly.

Like if this book was a stick of rock, the words death and ageing would be all the way through.

In fact, there was a great line early on, it says, being over 70 is like being engaged in a war.

All our friends are going or gone and we survive amongst the dead and dying as on a battlefield.

And I think Muriel Spark said it came partly out of her experience of going hospital visiting with her mother.

When she came back to Edinburgh, they would occasionally go and visit friends of her mother's in hospital.