The Dead Beats - Doug Johnstone

Book Details

Country: Scotland
Language: English
Genre: Modern Fiction
Publisher: Faber and Faber
Publication Date: 2014



Genre: Grunge, Alt-Rock
Country: Scotland
Real World Artists: In an interview for online literary magazine upcoming4.me, Johnstone wrote, "Interspersed with the modern day action in Edinburgh are a number of gig scenes from back in the early 90s, dealing with how Martha’s parents met and fell apart. I wanted to look at the differences between the generations – no one really talks about the generation gap anymore, but I was intrigued about how 20-year-olds today interact with their culture and their world so much differently from my generation when I was that age 20 years ago.

"The gigs are all grunge or alt.rock, bands like Nirvana and Soundgarden, a scene I was a part of in Scotland around that time, so I used a lot of my own personal experience for those scenes. The ‘loser’, underachieving attitude of grunge was something I wanted to look at too – does that hold up under close scrutiny? Is it relevant in the twenty-first century? How does the idea of slackerdom look to someone of Martha’s generation?"

Jacket Blurb: 

Meet Martha. It's the first day of her new job as intern at Edinburgh's The Standard. But all's not well at the ailing newspaper, and Martha is carrying some serious baggage of her own.

Put straight onto the obituary page, she takes a call from a former employee who seems to commit suicide while on the phone, something which echoes with her own troubled past.

Setting in motion a frantic race around modern-day Edinburgh,The Dead Beat traces Martha's desperate search for answers to the dark mystery of her parents' past. Soundtracked by and interspersed with a series of gigs from the alternative music scene of her parents' generation in the early '90s, Doug Johnstone's latest page-turner is a wild ride of a thriller, and a perfect follow-on to his #1 Kindle bestseller, Hit & Run.