An audience with Christopher Brookmyre.

Chris Brookmyre visited Dundee last night on his latest book promotion tour. The latest book 'Flesh Wounds' is another crime novel based in Glasgow and looks again at the Glasgow 'gangster' scene with the young private investigator Jasmine Sharp.

I first heard of Chris when I bought the book 'a big boy did it and ran away'

I couldn't resist the title and loved reading the book. Dark humour with some great one liners.

There was a good crowd at the Steps Theatre and Chris soon had the audience laughing as he read some reviews of his books from Amazon.com ( US buyers ). Amazon did a one off 99cents download so thousands of readers in the US took a punt at his book. Chris picked his favourite 'one star' reviews and the complaints were mainly against "the foul British Linguige "(sic) and included someone who was going to "purge the book off of their device" as if it was a virus or something.

There was a chance for the audience to question Chris and things didn't start well when the first questioner asked if Chris could sign his book now so he could go home. He was only there because his daughter had asked him to get his book signed. This was politely dealt with and the questions got a bit better. One bloke asked why authors like Chris and the late great Iain Banks enjoyed their foray into science fiction writing so much and Chris explained that it allowed them to open up their imagination and let rip. Authors were a bit contained when writing and science fiction opened the floodgates to their imagination. His science fiction novel 'Bedlam' is being made into a computer game and will include a retrospective look at my favourite game of all time 'Quake 2' and it's sometimes dodgy graphics. The game is still under production in Brighton but Chris managed to have a play with the pre production game and said that there were some great 'shoot em up' sequences.

As the audience questioning was coming to an end I put my hand up and asked if he supported independence for Scotland. I remember Iain Banks was keen on independence and was interested to know where Chris stood on the issue.

His answer was.........YES !