… Loaded Laptop Alert …Licence To Kill …Polite Warning …DO NOT APPROACH THIS WRITER…
…I s’pose when ye’ve spent most of yer life ‘behaving yerself’ at home, at school, in nice company… when the opportunity presents itself to kick over the traces, and… well… go nuts, really… in a way that actuallydoesn’t hurt emb’dy… who can resist?… one of the joys of being a novelist is ye can dispose of people… make them go away, permanently… ceasing to breathe… inventive methods of elimination are restricted only by yer imagination… in the olden days of gangster-type novels a favouredgo-away-and-don’t-come-back stunt was being part of the ingredients in a cement-mixer cake… if we’re to believe it all, most of the buildings in inner city America have Deceased-Three-Finger-Freddie-typefossilised foundations… thebluudthurstyhunger that settles so comfortably into the crime thriller scribbler’s quiver is startling… at the last count, in two and a half novels, I’ve killed off more people than the Bubonic Plague accounted for in the mid-1600′s… and it all seems so pleasurable… if this were ‘real-life’… where with a whirl of my whim, lethal licence were granted to me… stand back and watch the devastation… first up are the people who install those infernal robo-answering machines in companies, taking twenty minutes of your runaround time to get back to, ‘…if ye’re still here, press ’1′ again, yer call is important to us…’next rub-out candidates are the Loonies in the Supermarkets… ye know the ones… ye’ve got yer two, maximum three items ready and ye make a beeline for the till checkout lady at the end exit row… ye can’t miss it… above it, hangs a billboard-size notice in wurds that even Blind Pugh could read, ‘ten items or less—and cash only’… the bloke in front starts to empty his lot onto the sliding conveyor thingy… the checkout lady starts to ring up the items,…Ka-Ching! Ka-Ching! Ka-Ching! Ka-Ching!... when the Ka-Ching! Kount reachesfifteenitems, his hand-basket resembles a conjurer’s box… items keep appearing… my Govan Docklands sense of right and wrong can’t be contained… I ask the fellow in disgust… ‘so, which is it?… ye can’t read?… or ye can’t count?’… he stiffens up, spreads his hands and says (get this!), ‘well, ye know, I’m in a hurry’… this is when the fight usually starts… to the unrestrained delight of the rest of the 10-or-less brigade in the queue behind me, I launch into one of my tirades,‘Oh, ye’re in hurry? well that’s okay, coz I’ve got my whole life to wait here at the FAST checkout queue, waiting to teach numpties like you how to read and count’… fluster, fluster, from Mister Can’t-Read-Or-Count… he makes to pay… with a credit card... he hasn’t a red cent on him!… of course, the card limit has long been exhausted and gets rejected…ye get the idea… the late Ian Fleming, he who gave us the ageless Jimmy Bond, Dubble-Oh-Slur, used to mark a wee pencil cross on every tenth page of his manuscripts… this told him it was time for another blow-’em-to-hell-or-somewhere bit of action… I sense my manuscripts may have more crosses than a tic-tac-toe convention… I’m thinking of calling Crime Writers Overkill Anonymous… they should be able to help…see yeez later…
