Date set for New Edition of The Long Midnight of Barney Thomson
Added on 25 October 2008
Long Midnight Publishing have announced the release of a new edition of Douglas Lindsay's cult 90's crime novel, The Long Midnight of Barney Thomson. With a new cover by celebrated Polish designer Iza Swierad, the release is the first step in the re-launching of the Barney Thomson series.Released in February 1999 to strong critical acclaim, the book which The Scotsman described as "gleefully macabre, hugely enjoyable black burlesque" is now entering its third reprint, and its fourth different cover. Swierad was tasked to come up with a mischievous figure of Death to illustrate the combination of dark comedy and bloody murder which was to become the trademark of the entire series.
"This isn't a series of crime novels in the conventional sense," said Long Midnight Publishing's artistic director, Solomon Kane. "The books are set in a bizarre and insane world, where so many normal rules are subverted. But that's not to say that a lot of people don't get brutally murdered in them. It's this sense of chaos which has made them so successful."
For this edition Lindsay has gone back to his original manuscript of the book, changing the tense of the prose and replacing much of the Glasgow dialect. "I wanted to get a feel for the way people talked in the west of Scotland, without making the dialogue arduous to read," said Lindsay. "So I've concentrated on the phrasing and the flow of speech, the words they would use in a particular situation, rather than reinventing the language to illustrate the point."
Despite going back to the original manuscript, Lindsay is set to disappoint fans with news that the infamous "Blair butcher scene", rumoured to involve Barney Thomson feeding the British Prime Minister to a herd of rabid alpaca, continues to be omitted from the text.
"Even ten years on," said Lindsay, "it still doesn't quite fit."
The Long Midnight of Barney Thomson, Second Edition, is released on 14th November 2008.
