Quite Ugly One Evening by Chris Brookmyre review: 'a fine bit of escapism on the high seas'

Thunderbirds first. Of course, Brookmyre’s fictional Imaskynation Productions has nothing to do with Gerry and Sylvia Anderson’s celebrated puppets. The Maskyn family, however, owns a lucrative business which started in the 1960s with a series called The Imaginators, in which puppets boldly went off to discover new worlds on British children’s TV. The franchise passed down to the next generation of Maskyns, nearly vanished when a computer-animated series flopped, but now it is about to be relaunched as a computer game.

This is where the family’s problems start. Because just as a transatlantic cruise celebrating 60 years of The Imaginators sets off with three generations of Maskyns aboard, they find themselves not just in the middle of the Atlantic, but in the middle of a culture war too. The series needs to have a retcon, which to save you looking up, is short for retroactive continuity - in other words some cleaning up of awkward sexist and racist storylines in the original Sixties show.

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This is where the Succession link comes in, because all of those things are precisely what a right-wing plutocrat wants to preserve by buying the family out, and he flies in by helicopter to try and make the deal. The Maskyns - there are 11 of them on board - are murderously split. One body less and the vote could go a different way.

All of this is well, not to say lovingly, done. The cruise setting is well realised (the afterword records Brookmyre’s thanks for an invitation to a “more luxuriant and less murdery” transatlantic crossing) and he has convincingly imagined the Imaginator costumes, masks, and the kind of catchphrases that might work themselves into a culture war. It’s the same with Parlabane. Caught out in a journalistic sting that backfires, coming to terms with the death of his mother, feeling his age (nearly 60), he too seems more plausible than usual. Almost.

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All the same, rather like Benoit Blanc in Glass Onion, Parlabane remains gloriously PC and OTT. If you’ve never come across him before, you can catch a flavour of this in his response to this suggestion of how he could a) get a career-saving exclusive and b) solve a 40-year-old spy murder mystery: “You’re saying my mission, should I choose to accept it, would be to put myself on board a vessel I can’t get off for a week, in the company of several hundred fanboy incels, alongside an over-remunerated family of nepo babies, trust fund pukes, and outright fascists. And also that on board there might be a foreign intelligence agent with a track record of murdering people sent to sniff them out?”

But that is indeed the mission, and if you think it’s a tall order, you have no idea how much taller it is going to get when, after starting off with a locked room murder mystery, Parlabane ... but no, I can’t spoil it. All I can say is that there is a plot twist involving such a ridiculously outrageous coincidence that I burst out laughing at its sheer chutzpah.

This is not, I feel, a book to give anyone who still thinks Brexit was a good idea or would ever be tempted to wear a MAGA hat. But by the end, even though one might feel rather slapped around the chops by such a rapid succession of plausible culprits (11 Maskyns: 11 possibilities) as Parlabane closes in on the real culprit, it is an interesting take on the culture wars, as well as a fine bit of escapism on the high seas.

Quite Ugly One Evening, Chris Brookmyre, Little, Brown, £22

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