Johnston, Paul
Entry updated 12 September 2022. Tagged: Author.
(1957- ) Scottish author, partially resident in Greece, whose noirish Quint Dalrymple sequence – comprising Body Politic (1997), The Bone Yard (1998), Water of Death (1999), The Blood Tree (2000), The House of Dust (2001), Heads or Hearts (2015), Skeleton Blues (2016) and Impolitic Corpses (2019) – is a series of detections set in the Edinburgh of the 2020s, which has become a City-state, as has Glasgow, Europe having been balkanized by internal conflicts and Drug-wars, and devastated by Climate Change. Until 2020 Edinburgh itself had been murder-free for years; Dalrymple, hired by the City Guardians after an unexpected killing in that year, engages in various investigations, including murder, illegal Genetic Engineering and conspiracies to topple the state, the most serious of the latter surfacing in The House of Dust, as the secretly totalitarian self-proclaimed Utopian city state of New Oxford attempts to corrupt the hard-won polity of Edinburgh. [JC]
Paul Johnston
born Edinburgh, Scotland: 1957
works
series
Quint Dalrymple
- Body Politic (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1997) [Quint Dalrymple: hb/Bill Gregory]
- The Bone Yard (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1998) [Quint Dalrymple: hb/Bill Gregory]
- Water of Death (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1999) [Quint Dalrymple: hb/Bill Gregory]
- The Blood Tree (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 2000) [Quint Dalrymple: hb/Stewart Larking]
- The House of Dust (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 2001) [Quint Dalrymple: hb/Stewart Larking]
- Heads or Hearts (London: Severn House, 2015) [Quint Dalrymple: hb/Shutterstock]
- Skeleton Blues (London: Severn House, 2016) [Quint Dalrymple: hb/Shutterstock]
- Impolitic Corpses (London: Severn House, 2019) [Quint Dalrymple: hb/]
links
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