The Booked! Festival of Words was delighted to welcome back Christopher Brookmyre for a second time. Christopher is one of the biggest names in the UK and abroad in the field of crime writing and he proved himself to be just as big a draw the second time around. Dalmuir Library was quickly packed as people arrived to hear him talk about his latest novel The Attack of the Unsinkable Rubber Ducks.

The new novel has a philosophical theme at the heart of it, namely, the conflict between reason and superstition. Christopher opened his talk by reading out a plethora of statistics which revealed the gullibility of both the American and British public in believing in phenomena such as psychics and astrology for which there is little or nothing in the way of concrete evidence. He has always been interested in magic and in how illusion and deception work. Christopher told the audience how James Randi, the magician and a fierce exponent of the powers of reason, has exposed Uri Geller as being a charlatan and a trickster. He then actively demonstrated how we can all be fooled by conducting an experiment in which members of the audience were asked to write down their name and favourite film on a piece of paper which was then placed in an envelope. Christopher then proceeded to read out these people’s names and favourite films after initially pretending that it couldn’t work. He emphasised that he had just played a trick on us and it did not demonstrate that he possessed psychic powers.

Christopher read extracts from The Attack of the Unsinkable Rubber Ducks and from an unpublished novel, which will be released in August. The readings went down very well, as Christopher’s work is not only very funny, but he is also very gifted at reading it out in an expressive and highly amusing way. He fielded a large number of questions from the audience which dealt with topics such as his influences, whether there would be more film/TV adaptations of his work, the inspiration for his characters and whether or not his talent had been spotted at school. He gave humorous and interesting responses, all of which revealed, that as well as having a well developed sense of humour, he is very angry about many of the injustices, absurdities and excesses that blight contemporary society. His forthcoming book is a scathing satire on celebrity culture and it seems to embody many of his major pre-occupations. He finished with a hilarious anecdote involving a letter, a well-known retailer, a plastic bag and a pornographic magazine – if you missed it I will leave the rest to your imagination. As they say, you really had to be there!