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Sanchez (SS), Rodriguez (CF), Palmeiro (DH), Valdez (2B), Guerrero (1B), Reyes (LF), Castillo (3B), Martinez (C), Cruz (RF). The Dominican daily newspaper faithfully reported the baseball box scores. Day after day the players dreamed of a fat contract in the Major Leagues just across the ocean. The numbers against their name would be the key factor to securing that new life.

Morris (x4) 8.15. Carhart (x2) 9pm. O'Shaugnessey (x5) 8.45. Davidovich (x8) 8.30. Somers (x2) 9pm. Vickers (x4) 10pm. The Strickland party has just cancelled their reservation. That's eight meals the restaurant is out on, unless we get some walk up custom. Vickers, once a year on their anniversary; if you look back in the book exactly one year, there they'll be. Complementary drinks for them. Put the O'Shaugnessey party on the table for eight. Then we won't look so bereft...

Francoise Mauriac, Francis Jeansen, Jean-Paul Sartre, Guy Debord, Andre Breton, Marguerite Duras, Andre Masson, Alain Resnais, Simone Signoret, Maurice Blanchot, we the undersigned wish to state our opposition to the present governmental and national policy. We hope that the value and weight of our names on the spines of our books, on the credits of our movies and on the corners of our canvasses will help sway the minds of countless of our countrymen to apply their own names to our petition. Merci et vive la Republique!

Wayne Crawford Perth, Australia. Carla Baldelli, Bari, Richard and Diane Wood, Bath, UK. Angelos Charisteas, Thessaloniki. Radoslaw Murawski & Dariusz Glowacki, Wrocklaw, Polska. We love your holy cathedral, it is very inspiring. But we don't understand why people scratch their names into the wall when we are happy to sign this book of visitors. They spoil its beauty we think. You must take better care of the holy.

J.Clark 607701, 3 books history. N.Hardiman 644093, 2 books fiction, 1 book literary criticism. V.Stanger 688156, 1 book popular science. G.Oswald 633271, 3 audiobooks. K.Guptil 649757, 2 books renewed cookery /house and garden. L.Simmonds 656920, 5 books, romance (overdue fines paid in full)

Merrick L, Merrill N, Merry D, Merryman K, Merryweather B, Merryweather H, Mervyn P, Line after line, column after column, the ranks slaughtered trying to rush the enemy trenches of the First World War. The men drawn from this modest village into a worldwide conflict. Commemorated on the marble plinth bearing a white obelisk atop. The Church that played host to it now without a congregation as the youth have all long since left the area.

8.15 Miller B to D. 9.15 Coleman Brow Lift. 11.30 McCallister C to E. 13.30 Kavanagh Tummy Tuck 16.00 Reed Liposuction 17.45 Vincent B to DD. The names on the notes change, but not the hankering to be somebody else.

I had long-lived grandparents. And long-lived cats too, one was bought 6 months before my birth and lived to the ripe old age of 23. So I wasn't exposed to death at a premature age. Well, not directly anyway.

Five years before my birth, my parents had a baby girl who died at one month of meningitis. Of course I wasn't witness to this, though its shadow lay over our household, having lit the most slow-burning of fuses of guilt and recrimination that contributed to the eventual dissolution of my parents' marriage.��

I can't remember exactly how old I was when I first encountered death from a distance. Our family were on holiday in one of the Spanish island resorts. A speedboat had ploughed towards two swimmers and the propeller had fatally sliced on of them. We saw the aftermath from our hotel balcony, that is to say we didn't really see anything. So my experience was aural really, all the buzz in the air of rubberneckers staring out to sea and a police recovery boat. One of the popular theories was that the pilot had been recumbent and was steering the boat with his feet. I can't even remember if we saw a covered stretcher or not. If we did, it�� certainly wasn't stained red by blood. Nothing to see here, yes absolutely.��

The next occasion was also while on holiday, this time in a city. My parents were friends with a Suffolk County, NY pathologist and he gave us a tour of his workplace, including a small black museum. It was a pretty sanitised tour, I think because 14 year old me was present. However, passing an open door, I did see a man laid out on the slab awaiting autopsy. I wasn't walking right at the boundary of the door, so saw it from mid-distance in the corridor. The man looked plastic, unreal. Maybe it was the muted lighting in the room rather than his death pallor, but it was a death that left no impression on me, because it didn't look like anything corporeally human. No wonder people who come across dead bodies often mistake them first for shop mannequins. I've mused on this in my new novel ��

When I was 19, my father attempted suicide inside the family home. Again I had the unreal sight framed for me by the disposition of doors. He had attempted the act in the kitchen, which was accessed via a laundry room with washing machine and dryer. So I was looking through two sets of door lintels, that of the laundry room and then that of the kitchen. Added to this sense of the filmic, he was wearing an all-white towelling robe. The whole scene was like a black and white art movie. He had tried to open up veins in his neck and his head had fallen backwards, but the blood must have flowed down the from of the robe, because again, the incontrovertible evidence of blood wasn't visible to me from my angle. However, it became all too present when I was the one deputed to clean up the floor after he'd been taken to hospital. Our kitchen lino was patterned with orange hexagons. The blood when it landed was also hexagonal. I marvelled when a blood hexagon fitted entirely within a floor hexagon, like a kid's colouring book that stays within the lines. It was the way of protecting myself from the awfulness of what it all meant.��It was my father's anatomical and medical ignorance that saved his life (plus the speedy response of the emergency services), since he had cut in the wrong, non-fatal location. As speedy as the ambulance crew were, they were beaten to our front door by two plain-clothes detectives who were responding to the 999 call of knife wound, before satisfying themselves it had been self-inflicted. A lot of this made it into my Kindle novel , comparing the mindset of domestic suicide to that of suicide bombers.��

And after that, my grandparents and pets did start dropping off their perch. I lost a teenage second cousin who had barely made it into teenagehood. I was in no position to process death beyond grief, which is not the same thing. We have the cognitive load capacity to process either grief or Death (as in our own future one), but not simultaneously. I am now 59 years old. My next book, almost complete, will be a consideration of death, as in my own, or anybody else in the first person, rather than the third person death embodied in the form of grief. There are books a plenty on grief, to go along with out personal experiences. There is no personal experience of one's own death and very little literature about it accordingly, because no one ever gets to come back and write up their notes on the subject.��

We are so protected from confronting death head on. My experiences as above, maybe more down to happenstance, but for example I wasn't allowed into the pathology suite with the dead body, and I was forbidden to go closer to my father in the kitchen. But is it just down to circumstances? One of the question the book considers, is��how much of our inability to comprehend death, is an existential (emotional) problem, or a linguistic one?��

Watch this space...

In the meantime you can read my latest novel,����"The Death Of The Author (In Triplicate)"��available from the publishers

Blurb:��

A trine cycle produced by three authors. A Senior Investigating Officer is on his way to a fresh murder. In his crisis of faith, he questions the material nature of evidence and the abstract judicial system they are put towards as proofs. The somatic dead body signposts a crime scene staged with symbols of the divine interred in one of the four elements constituting the material universe. In part 2, a widow and a literary agent are having a heated phone exchange about the fate of her late husband’s unfinished manuscript. In part 3, an author is taking down all his sticky notes, twine and graph paper for the book he has just completed, as he ponders the next steps and tries to anticipate some of the questions that will be thrown at him. Where does he get his ideas from, a paradox when set against the unremarkable act of sitting down at a desk, sticking notes up on the wall, crossing them out again and lighting up forbidden cigarettes and hiding the evidence from his wife. In showing his mundane workings, we are asked to trace the leap into a work of creative imagination. Until his literary future too is threatened.��

For more content on the novel

��In my previous post, ", I talked about 5 books which either influenced or at least echoed my current novel "The Death Of The Author (In Triplicate)". But it wasn't just literature which influenced my book. The author character in the final part of my novel in increasing despair as he reviews the book he has just finished for a final time, wonders if it's merely a monograph to his favourite album, "Three Imaginary Boys" by The Cure which was released in 1978.��

Here are my thoughts on the album.

Remember the self-proclaimed lo-fi genre of the late 80s early 90s, bands such as Pavement and Sebadoh? Well Robert Smith and The Cure got there a decade earlier with their album "Three Imaginary Boys".��
What could be more callow than taking the set text from your recently completed school A-Level French syllabus and turning it into a song “Killing An Arab��? Or there you are stuck in the studio needing to come up with a new track, picking up the Tate And Lyle sugar pack as you’re drinking your cup of tea tea and reading the details on the back of the packet, of how to apply for a free icing tool and then setting that to music? The track was called “So What?��, and it didn't even even omit the exact closing date for applying which has stuck in my mind some 38 years later and is of course, an offer that is now 38 years out of date. Did someone say 'timeless art'?��
There’s a cover version of Hendrix’s “Foxy Lady�� which is unrecognisable from the original as any good cover should be, principally down to Robert Smith’s deep South (England) drawling vowels. It ought to be pointed out that “Foxy Lady�� was just a band soundchecking in the studio and never intended to be part of the album, but the record label put it on much to Smith’s chagrin. He was never to surrender artistic control again, which in light of the Cure’s future 'Goth' output was a pity. Apparently the front cover was not Smith’s choice either, which is amazing as it's��my favourite album cover of all time. Props to whoever designed it.

The album is offbeat, charming and yes, lo-fi. That’s not to say it doesn’t have some excellent guitar playing, since Smith is a guitar whizz with oodles of reverb and echo, but held in check by a tight rhythm section. Unlike Gang of Four, the Fall or Public Image Limited, this record is readily accessible. It’s non-conformist musically, but it’s not abstruse.
But for me ultimately, it’s the strength of its individual tracks. It starts with ��10:15 Saturday Night��, which was the B-Side to their debut single “Killing An Arab��. What band open their debut album with a B-side? And then don’t put the A-Side anywhere on the album at all? Then comes my favourite track “Accuracy��, a song about a couple failing to communicate, with the pleasingly lyric delivered almost pleadingly by Smith, ‘Kill you without trying/ That’s ac-cu-racy��. There is edge in some of Smith’s words, such as in the song “Meathook��, ‘He really stole my heart/ Hung me up on a meathook/ A real piece of/ Slaughterhouse Art��. Ugh and that’s an image that has stayed with me I can tell you. And to cap it off, a hidden bonus track in which The Cure sort of play themselves off stage with a coda. If you have never heard this album and are keen on tracking it down, try and get hold of a version that includes their superlative early singles such as “Killing An Arab��, “Boys Don’t Cry�� and “Jumping Someone Else�� Train��.
How does it feature in my novel?��
In part 1 of the novel, the detective character's favourite music genre is Easy Listening, so that the author character in part 3 who created him, has had to subject himself to an unending play list of Easy Listening standards, from Dionne Warwick to Frank Sinatra. By the time he has completed the book, he is desperate to play his actual favourite songs which he has starved himself of for so long and to clean his palate of asinine Easy Listening. He weighs up which should be the first to celebrate the completion of the novel and is inundated by songs from the Cure album.��
Was that the situation I, as the actual author also found myself in, having had to listen to an interminable play list of Easy Listening while writing part 1 of the novel? That would be just be a touch too wouldn't it?��
The song "Object" with the inimitable lyric "You're just an object in my eyes" points up the eternal philosophical dilemma between mind and matter, which is central to the detective character in part one of my novel as he goes about a murder scene looking for evidence to unlock the identity and mind of the killer. The title of the song "So What" as described above, forms the final words of the novel as the author is in complete despair about his book and his profession.��




"The Death Of The Author (In Triplicate)" is from the publishers Corona\Samizdat
For more content on the novel visit��

��

When a musician is interviewed, very often they take the interviewer through their record collection for the music that inspired and influenced them. Authors are less directly forthcoming, since they tend to prefer to save such quoting for the body of their actual works themselves, burying references in the text to see who will spot them and who won't.��
The author character in my latest novel "The Death Of The Author (In Triplicate)" is having none of this game playing (though me as the 'invisible' author behind him, could conceivably be up to such metafictional games). He is committed to showing his literary workings, though he is also struggling not to reveal too much behind his work and explain it away completely.
So in the spirit of the author character, I thought I'd share some books that either directly fed into my novel, or at least echoed it in some ways. Some of them I'd read before I sat down to type the first words of my novel, others I read during the novel writing process and one I have yet to read but am aware at least of its (non-fictional) argument.��



A man has suffered so traumatic a brain injury, that he has lost all memory and has to be trained to walk again by his physios. We get a forensic treatment of that process of relearning basic everyday functions we take for granted. Into the void of his memory also comes these mental images he can't place. When he's released back into daily living, he has a sizeable compensation settlement and decides to devote it to recreate these visions inside his head in every tiny detail. From the architecture, to people paid to play the roles of the passersby in the street, doing precisely scripted things and the clothes they wear. Again this focus on a a forensic level of detail, which echoes the murder detective's process in my novel. McCarthy raises an interesting distinction, between a scene in a film which can be shot innumerable times until the Director is satisfied that it's right; versus the one-take of live performance and the protagonist of this novel trying to nail his image exactly in his live recreation. A detective is not dissimilar, in that at the start of an investigation, there are unlimited ways in which the crime unfurled and the task is to narrow that down to just one possible way the action of the event could have taken place.��










Georges Perec's final novel, as he raced against time to complete it before his life was claimed by cancer. A novel in three parts; the first being a mystery thriller around a disappeared writer in French colonial Africa, using his abandoned manuscript as a clue to his fate. Part 2 turns to an historical event of betrayal among the French Resistance in World War 2, which completely flips Part 1 on its head, as we see that story was a code for this actual incident that was too incendiary to write directly. Part 3 supposedly is the uncompleted part choked off by Perec's death and is presented as the fragmentary source material and documents that informed the story in Part 2. These were curated by two of Perec's writer friends who were members of the same Oulipo movement as him. HOWEVER, the Spanish author Enrique Villa-Matas in his novel "Mac And His Problem" posits that this too is smoke and mirrors on Perec's part; that in fact Part 3 is exactly as Perec intended and that the legend of his friends completing his book deliberately masks this fact. Through such a disguise, Perec was giving the middle finger to Death, because he DID finish his novel before Death claimed him, but veiled that fact, so it was just between him and the Grim Reaper. And Perec won (or at least went to his grave conceiving that he'd won). I also mirrored this tripartite structure, in that my novel moves from a crime thriller Part 1, through into Part 2's fevered argument over the ownership of the unfinished manuscript that was Part 1 between widow and literary agent and into Part 3, centring around the author who is responsible for penning Parts 1 & 2.��





This is the book I haven't actually read. But my own title clearly pays homage to this and I also touch on the central concept, as my author character muses on how he loses all control of his text once it is out in the world. Readers and critics will remake his text in whatever way they choose to read and interpret it, no matter what his original intentions for the story were. I do have fun with the concept as, per the "In Triplicate" of my book's title, three authors 'die' during the course of the novel, though an author can die, per Barthes, in metaphorical ways as well as in actuality.��












The first remarkable thing about this novel from 1937s, is that it was written by a 19-year old German refugee and yet encapsulates eve of war London and its nascent film industry so expertly and authentically. In a second language to boot! A movie actress is murdered, two different men confess to the crime. A film editor called Cameron McCabe, the nom de plume of the real author, is co-opted by the investigating detective and by two-thirds of the way through the book, we get a successful court prosecution of the murderer having unravelled the labyrinthine truth from all these false confessions and a murderer existing in plain sight. But it's a post-modernist epilogue that turns the novel on its head, in the form of a literary interrogation of the character Cameron McCabe from the first part of the book, which takes the opportunity to discuss the present (1930s) state of detective fiction. It uses real critics' words, only inserting Cameron McCabe for the names of the other crime thriller writers, so that it appears to be critics discussing this book "The Face On the Cutting Room Floor" in the book "The Face On The Cutting Room Floor". In this way, the book was called 'the detective novel to end all detective novels' at the time. I loved how it inserted itself into predicting it's own literary criticism and my author character does similar.��

So for my final book choice, it's one I didn't particularly enjoy as a reading experience. It's another book about a forensic description of the details of which the human eye sees in a city, as a detective is on the top deck of the bus as he follows the wife of a missing person he's ordered to get on the trail of. It's almost mathematical in its precision of describing people and objects interacting with one another, but ultimately one I found a little cold and dry emotionally. I much preferred the early works of Nicholson Baker, such as "The Mezzanine" and "Room Temperature", where he too looks at everyday objects and describes them and their taken-for-granted interior workings in minute detail, but there is greater warmth and humour than with Okotie I feel. Why is this forensic level of detail significant to me and my novel? Because there are presumptions about the material world which entirely lead and shape our thinking about it and the objects contained within, that detectives and forensic scientists have to get to the bottom of as the fundamental part of their work. Yet what happens if the investigative detective queries the very nature of matter and criminal evidence and refuses to accept those presumptions in the first place?��

"The Death Of The Author (In Triplicate)" is available Corona\Samizdat.
For , including thematic discussions and quote cards.

��When a murderer stages a crime scene, they are doing it for one of two reasons:

1) They may simply be trying to throw off the police from the evidence trail, such as stripping the victim's clothes to suggest a sexual component of the crime when no such act occurred

2) They are setting the police a puzzle to solve, over and above the identity of who killed the victim.

There is a further possible scenario, that the killer's psychological predilections are strong enough to demand the scene is arranged to fit with their fantasy that likely to drove them to murder in the first place, such a posing the deceased in a humiliating manner, as an expression of the killer's sense of superiority, or wish to mark the victim as 'deserving' of degradation beyond taking their life.��

A dead body is processed for clues as to the cause of death. Corporeality speaking to materiality, as science brings its analytical tools to bear. Evidence at the scene can be anything from bullet fragments, blood spatter, discarded cigarettes through to DNA traces and transferred fibres or plant material. All derive from the world of the material. However, in a staged scene, the realm of the symbolic is also engaged. The symbolic is not analysable by the same hard and fast facts as material evidence yielded by science. Rather, they are very much accessed through interpretation.

In my latest novel, "The Death Of The Author (In Triplicate)", there is a staged murder scene which is littered with deliberate symbols set up by the killer. To solve his or her identity, the detectives must first unravel the meaning of the field of symbols. Within the four elements of the material world, as constituted by the ancients all the way through to alchemists, that is fire (ashes), earth (garden soil), water (a jacuzzi) and air (a greenhouse), are discovered statues of gods and idols from every human mythology. Each divine is interred in their appropriate element. Gods of thunder, wind and cyclones are found in the greenhouse. Fertility and harvest gods in the potting shed's mound of soil.��

The latest scientific forensic techniques are being asked to go up hard against ancient belief and the precursor of science in the form of alchemy. Of course alchemy's primary search for the philosopher's stone, which would supposedly turn base metal into gold, was a fool's errand and yet many of the processes and equipment employed, such as boiling admixtures in glass retorts, led the way to many discoveries that helped usher in the modern world and modern chemistry. Many of the statues uncovered no longer have adherents and believers, rather humbly now just existing as exhibits in a museum. What is the murderer trying to say with this symbology? They believe themself much smarter than the forces of law and order, hence the setting out of the challenge of a puzzle. And yet they also want that cleverness, that self-perceived genius, to be acknowledged.��

In many ways, all fiction is a form of detective fiction. What is a novel if not a series of clues? A code to be cracked. The author carefully layers their work with whatever it is they want the reader to uncover and take away from their book. If it is made too obvious, the book is likely to be a poor read. If too oblique and difficult to discover, then the author's intentions go largely unfulfilled. In this way, the author shares a facet with the murderer above; they want their cleverness acknowledged. For the murderer it might be a boast or a public taunting of the police that brings about their downfall, as it gives away who they are and how to find them. For the author, it is talking about their book in interviews, struggling between the poles of revealing their art. as against not giving too much away.��

“The Death Of The Author (In Triplicate)”�� is available Corona\Samizdat ��

The question writers get asked most frequently is ‘where do you get your ideas from?�� We no longer credit that writers are beholden to their muses for literary inspiration, though a higher level answer is probably not possible either, since we remain in the dark on many processes in the brain, including that of creativity. The creative imagination may be built from an incessant curiosity, to ask questions about the world around us and an ability to make connections between things that are not handed down as part of our conceptual templates. But that is about as much as we can say at this point through the understanding afforded by neuroscience. A novelist asks questions and makes associations that are sustained over the length of a two hundred page book. That is an embodiment of the creative process, but not really an explanation of it. The author would prefer that the book speaks for itself and reveals its ideas, rather than have to explain it in interviews and essays.

The act of writing is a prosaic (pun intended) one, banal even. Sat at a desk typing on a keyboard, is no different from the action for an accountant or an actuary going through claims reports. It contains no magic. The accountant has their books of tax tables, the actuary their volumes on statistics and probability, while we authors have dictionaries and thesauruses. Of course, for all three of us now, these are available online in a mere extra window on our browser, thus streamlining and decluttering our desks and workstations further. On the wall of a writer’s study may be further evidence of the mundane; sticky notes, handwritten lists, graphs or diagrams plotting relationships or geographical choreography. Perhaps red twine, held by pins, links characters visually there on the wall as a mnemonic for the writer. Such a display has echoes of a police incident room, only lacking for photos of persons of interest.��

I can trace back the origin ideas for my latest novel. My conscious mind was musing (unintended pun) on the abstract concept of justice, which does not exist in Nature, codified into laws and how those laws are examined in instances of infraction, by recourse to fragments and traces of material evidence. Moving from the abstract to gross matter in such manner, seemed to me a mirroring of phenomenology’s ongoing inquiry into the balance between the materialist and the idealist conceptualisations of the world. My unconscious mind came up with the image of a particular staged crime scene in vivid detail, but no associated notions of how it fitted with anything else, such as a victim or a detective’s inquiry. When I brought the two together, there was the launch pad for the novel. One from curiosity and questioning, the other from heaven knows where, possibly from some remembered dream imagery.

I am an author who likes to show his workings. Not merely as some afterword in the end pages of a novel, but embedded into the structure and form of the novel itself. In this case, I have an author character doing exactly what I talked of above. Having finished the previous sections of the book, including the mystery thriller/ police procedural element and an exploration of why that halted�� suddenly and unsolved, this author is taking down his notes from the wall of his study and tidying up his pens. His mind ranges over speculations such as the book’s critical reception, likely interview questions and whether the notes he’s removing should form part of a notional literary archive. There is a tension between him preserving the mystery of the dark arts of writing, versus not over-explaining his novel and taking the artistry out of it by relaying where his ideas for the book came from. It is in this tension, that the process of thriller writing is itself demystified. From the mundane act of sitting typing at a desk, to a book that thrills a reader in their imagination, is no less of a leap as that of the abstract concept of justice is from the material evidence that underpins it.��

My new novel��“The Death Of The Author (In Triplicate)”��

Available direct ��Corona\Samizdat

For the full extra content on my new novel, more videos and quote cards, go

��

My new novel "The Death Of The Author (In Triplicate) is out now Corona\Samizdat.

It's a novel in 3 parts, with a Russian Dolls set of authors responsible for the production of the previous part. Part one is a police procedural/mystery thriller. A Senior Investigations Officer is on the way to a fresh murder and is having a crisis of faith as he questions both the nature of justice and the role material evidence plays in it. Part 2 is a heated dialogue between a widow and a literary agent as they argue over who should own an unfinished manuscript of the widow's late author husband, a battle for the memory and soul of the dead man. Part 3 sees an author having just completed his novel, tidying away all his noted stuck on the wall and clearing up his desk, as his thoughts turn towards the marketing of his book and trying to anticipate the response of critics and interview questions he'll likely be asked. As he determines not to reveal the magic behind being a creative person, the very mundane nature of sitting in a room typing on a keyboard betrays his intention and serves to demystify the mystery of thriller writing.��

I call it a novel of crime scene reconstruction and a literary scene deconstruction.��

Here are 3 short videos discussing some of the key themes.��

Justice is an abstract concept that doesn't exist anywhere else in Nature. It is codified in written laws and cases of infractions of those laws are tried on the basis of material witnesses and material evidence, which represent an entirely different register of language from an abstract concept.

�� �� �� �� �� �� �� �� �� �� �� �� �� �� �� �� �� �� �� �� ��The relationship of abstract justice to material evidence underpinning it, is resonant of the age old phenomenological inquiry into the nature of reality: the materialist versus idealist debate.��Is there a single, verifiable objective reality rooted in matter, or is everything ultimately determined by our language, naming and idea of things? In the novel, the Senior Investigation officer is having a crisis of faith in accepting the rules of evidence as being sufficient to prove anything.






The��third and final section of the novel, is through the eyes of a third person author who has just completed writing his book and is thinking about its critical reception and the likely interview questions he will be asked about the process of writing it. Behind his grappling with these questions and revealing his own thoughts, lies the true first person author, that being Marc Nash who wrote part three as well as parts one and two and the tension between the truth of the author in part three with Nash's own personal truth.





Here are some quotes from the book.
Part 1: The Senior Detective is having a crisis of faith...
�� �� �� �� �� �� ��

"Like the 2011 riots, using Blackberries in order to organise riots for looting Blackberries. Man, we had both our hands and testicles tied behind our backs for that infantifada. Even so, we did secure our dreary, desultory requital sure enough. Months spent scanning faces on surveillance footage from the shops they hadn’t pillaged, plus more numbskullery advertising their ill-gotten gains on social media. Our techies palpating facial recognition software while we, the ones who had formed the anaemic thin blue arterial lines on the night, twiddle our singed fingers, as they swipe right on Match-dot-Con. We took the streets back, sat there behind our desks. The thin end of the fibre optic wedge, where we are adjuncts, mere auxiliaries of technology".

“At some point in the future, babies will emerge into the fluorescence of the world, sporting bandanas beneath hooded babygros, rakishly raked mini baseball caps covering their cradle cap. Fingers reflexively thrown up towards the tiny mouth, being parsed for gang signs. The midwifes’s slap answered with a punch��.��

“When is a gun not a gun? When it’s a replica. But if a replica is pointed at a human target in a hold-up, then does it not operate with the exact same ramification of a gun? And further, when that replica has been retooled to make it functional, then it’s no longer pseudo, mock, nor a simulacrum, (all words I’ve heard defence QCs {pseudo, mock, or simulacra human beings} use in court), since now it actually fires bullets & can draw blood. Apparently, you can even manufacture one on a 3-D printer. Oh Mercy Mercy Me as Marvin used to sing. And that poor beautiful bastard was shot to death too. On April Fool’s Day, in the year of Orwell’s ��1984��. Can there have been a more ill-omened date on which to die?”��

“Forensics, I have come to realise, is phenomenology writ large. Or microscopically small as is more often the case. I do not instinctively know what looks out of place. Any objects in front of me could bear significance. Initially I have to make myself take notice of them all and not filter a single one out as quotidian, neutral and innocent. I have to crowbar into my consciousness, an awareness of everything that populates a scene. A sort of mental cubism, as I plot the lie and locus of everything simultaneously. This is a field through and through, yet with most things remaining unintegrated with one another. This is not a web of connection of objects.��

Part 3: Someone seemingly having a better day is the author who has just completed his novel.

"He reached for the wire mesh bin beneath the desk. It was empty. His wife must have emptied it. How she would have honourably separated out the recyclables, the coke cans and half-measure spirit bottles, from the lolly sticks and cigarette stubs. Anything that basically had made an appearance on the traffic calming roundabout scene, first made their bow in his litter bin. All writers adopted the methods of Kaiser Söze. Whether they cared to admit it or not."��

"Oh god, there was also the prospect of having to get active on his social media accounts once again. Bad enough trying to compose a two hundred word blurb. On Twitter he had just two hundred and eighty characters. With spaces. On Instagram he had to make it so that someone viewing it on their phone, wouldn’t be obliged to scroll down and risk contracting repetitive strain injury. Unlike him, typing away eight hours a day for almost a year to deliver a novel. Wrists of steel. All the fun of the fair, of perpetual swiping right on an app, from shoes, through take-away dishes, to lust at first pixelated sight. How could any work of literature compete?"

He hadn’t experienced much in the way of transference with her, save for the transfer of funds from his bank account into hers. He could console himself that at least he had unsettled her momentarily from her upright (uptight?) poise, when he challenged her to specify how many sessions in her professional experience, it would take to cauterise, suture and heal the gash of a therapist-shaped hole in his life? Turned out to be a poor choice of imagery. Since the imagery of wounds had been invoked, Kafka was inevitably brought up. Which itself allowed her to sweep in with the whole Oedipal thing between Franz and his father and how he himself obviously related to that. By what means had he become embroiled in a literary discussion with his therapist? Since he received fees, (or more accurately expenses), for appearing on literary panels, he should be charging her for his expertise, for that session at least��.��

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No authors were harmed in the making of this book

an endorsement from Kurt Vonnegut Jnr (puppet)
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��What links billionaire space exploration vanity projects, with the desperate crossings of the English Channel in unsafe boats by desperate migrants? I think me and my illustrator may just have the answer...��

There is an increasing narrative that we will all inevitably contract some variant of COVID at some point and that we should all accept this fact and allow our government to get on with conducting business as normal and not have any further restrictions placed on our (economic) freedoms.��

This is just herd immunity under another guise. It is immoral, pernicious and plain wrong. For the reasons I give in his video.��

Stay safe and get boosted.��

��So in the light of my fury a Cop26, I drew up some ideas for cartoons and called on my old cartoonist collaborator (we'd collaborated on a ).��

This is what we came up with. It's what happens we you vote into power a bunch of middle-managers, who can only think in terms of economics, rather than the value of human life. Happy Christmas!��