Thanks to Annie, I am almost at the end of my first Christopher Brookmyre – The Sacred Art of Stealing. A Situationist / Dadaist bank heist, some excellent misdirection, a girl and quite a few guns (though I always thought Godard was wrong – all you need is a girl). I found the opening hard to get into, as the American vernacular didn’t quite ring true. The Scottish vernacular, however, is excellent. And this is genius:
…there are certain mistakes that you know you just have to make, know you’re going to make, no matter what conscience, logic or fear are telling you.
It’s a simple truth of human existence. Across thousands of years of civilisation, throughout the rise and fall of empires and our stumbling ascent from the forests to the stars, greater men than Zal had contemplated the wisdom of their intentions before coming to exactly the same conclusion.
And there was usually a girl involved, yeah.