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(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]
born Edinburgh, Scotland: 1957
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series
Quint Dalrymple
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Entry from The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction (2011-current) edited by John Clute and David Langford.
Accessed 18:35 pm on 19 April 2024.
<https://sf-encyclopedia.com/entry/johnston_paul>