Peace on Earth

By Paddy Bostock
Adventure/Humour, 381 pages
cover art by: Richard Stroud

Mankind profits from nothing more than war. Hence, rumours about the existence of a disk said to contain the formula to "peace on earth," obtained by a failed actor with a penchant for visions, pose a major threat to the planet. This unleashes a frantic hunt for the disk across continents, involving government agencies, master criminals, petty criminals, and would-be criminals, plus the local population of Pont-y-Pant: the tiny Welsh village on which disparate characters converge as the putative location of the errant disk.

However, nobody has taken into account the role that will be played by the three-year-old Newfoundland acting as the disk's self-appointed custodian.

Excerpt:

Life for residents of Sitges's Carrer Espanya, where Miguel Ramírez's hideaway-from-family apartment was located, might easily have continued in its normal drowsy, boozy, sexy, August fashion on the balmy night in question had it not been for the peculiar conflux in their midst of three factors:
Factor A: (per se not all that remarkable), the re-arrival in the street of Miguel's Range Rover Evoque. Residents looking down from behind their summertime lace curtains and Venetian blinds knew all about the Evoque and admired Miguel's cojones for owning it. Also, given his underground parking facility, the car had never caused trouble for either pedestrians or other vehicles. So...no hay problema.

Factor B: the appearance, only moments later, of an all-black-with-silver-tinted-windows Hummer the size of a bus, which parked slap in the middle of the road, and out of which climbed four bullfighters-two banderillos, one picador, and one torero-all of whom took to mooching about, looking up at windows and speaking to each other in a variety of languages, none of them Catalan or Spanish so far as residents could tell. The lace curtains and Venetian blind slats parted considerably at this arrival. Ears cocked, eyes peeled, anger building in case anybody wanted to get out of his underground parking facility and the jodering Hummer was in the jodering way. Plus, who were these guys...?
Factor C: the parking, behind the all-black-with-silver-tinted-windows, of the little red Seat Ibiza, out of which jumped two young women who might, or might not, have been whores.

Unbeknownst to any of the Carrer Espanya residents-obviously-was the deal Magistrate Lady Dunwithy had brokered with Sergeant Gwyn Williams such that Esperanza and Chiquita would avoid prosecution in Welsh courts for kicking the crap out of three locals and be freed to return to Spain as long as they promised to leave Pont-y-Pant immediately and never return.

Why? Because Lady Dunwithy-a staunch admirer of Emmeline Pankhurst-championed the girls' brutal athleticism and only wished she had been taught similar tricks when young. And, if Gwyn Williams wanted to keep his job, never mind his pension, he would stop whingeing about prosecutions, jail, and suchlike.

So it was that Esperanza and Chiquita, still very keen to learn more about the…albeit possibly apocryphal…paz mundial story despite their recent setback, had caught the next plane back to Barcelona where it didn't take them long to learn-by smacking Xabi Hernández around the head a bit-where (thwack, thwack) they might (thwack, thwack) find Miguel Ramírez whom they reckoned to be the mastermind behind the operation, seeing as Xabi was too dim to find his own arse with an arse map.

"At Carrer Espanya, número 65, Sitges," a beaten Xabi had cravenly told them. Whither the girls headed as fast as their little red Seat Ibiza would take them, and, finding no available parking place, left the car bumper-to-bumper with the all-black-with-silver-tinted-windows Hummer in the middle of the street.

Noddy in Wonderland

By Paddy Bostock
Fantasy, 346 pages
Cover art by Richard Stroud
Purchase Link

In his wildest dreams, Afghanistan war veteran Noddy Stoddart fantasised about becoming king of Liverpool, even though his brother, Knobby, told him he was crazy. But shooting government minister St John Jaunston in the bottom with an air rifle on a visit to the city leads bizarrely to Noddy’s dream coming true--as president of the newly created People’s Republic of Liverpool.

Outraged as Noddy and his Goth/Punk girlfriend set Britain against him through further “bottom blasting” and then faux vampire actions before escaping to a castle in France, the prime minister initially threatens ancient punishments. But, facing Cabinet backstabbing and the loss of a general election, he succumbs to realpolitik and invites the miscreants home as voter bait.

Mistake, because that’s when—with a little help from his friends, and the involvement of an elf and his dog, Noddy takes full advantage.

Excerpt:
The Château de Chanteloire’s Great Hall had witnessed many spectacular historic moments across the centuries—including the bloody, ninth-century altercation between King Louis the Pious and his renegade son, Lothar—and was closed to a general public unaware of its existence. This because it was known only to its current owner, Compte Lucien de Rubempré and his centuries-old pals Mordecai and Arnaud, for whom a return to past glories was always “à disposition,” as he put it.

The size of an average tennis court and refurbished in largely Renaissance style, the hall could seat forty-eight guests on turquoise velvet-covered, high-backed chairs ranged along two mahogany tables each stretching the length of the polished-pine floor fifty feet below the beamed ceiling from which hung candle-lit chandeliers on silver and gold chains. Further illumination was provided by sconces on the gilt-varnished walls. In short, it was a place fit for royalty to impress their neighbours. Also a place for them to eat and drink to excess, canoodle, plot, and fight. Little wonder, with their humble origins, that Noddy, Meryl, Knobby, Rodney, Anthea, Rollo and Ernie should have been gobsmacked when ushered into it by an unctuous Compte Lucien.

“Holy shit!” said Knobby, for example.

But, accustomed to such surroundings, Mordy and Arnaud just smiled and took their seats—Arnaud’s on a special dog chair—around the end of one of the immense tables laid out for this evening’s small party.

“Join us, chaps and chapesses, do,” said Mordy, waving an inviting arm at those still clustered at the doorway staring into a room the like of which they had never seen.

And, one by one, they did. Sitting carefully in case they knocked over one of the crystal goblets set before them, or besmirched any of the gleaming silverware laid out for the entrée of spit-roasted quail and then a main course of wild boar stewed in a sauce of tomatoes and red wine, which would soon be placed before them by three maids in white blousons with purple velvet jupes.

“Just take it easy and relax,” Mordy advised. “It’s only a junket after all.”

“Rauf, rauf,” said Arnaud, who would be served his dinner in a special pewter bowl, on which was inscribed in gold letters: Chien.

“But first a toast,” Mordy said, standing on his chair and raising his goblet of Pouilly-Fumé while the maids hurried to fill their guests’ glasses with local Loire reds, whites, and rosés of their choice.

Noddy, Knobby, and Ernie said they’d rather have a beer, thank you very much, but Mordy wasn’t having any of that.

“When in Rome,” he said.

“We’re not in Rome,” said Noddy.

“Manner of speaking, mon ami. Do try a drop of the Pouilly-Fumé. Put hairs on your chest. I can assure you it is of the finest quality.”

So Noddy, Knobby, and Ernie did as advised, while Rodney, Rollo, Anthea, and Meryl went for an assortment of Pinots, Chardonnays, and Rosés d’Anjou.

“Jolly dee,” Mordy said when all the glasses were brimming and everybody was standing expectantly at his or her place. “So, here’s to us all!”

“Us all!” chorused the crews of both the Deux Chevaux and the Range Rover Vogue Sport, swigging at their goblets.

“But especially to Noddy and Meryl without whom this celebration would never have taken place,” Mordy added, addressing the pair sitting next to him.

“Noddy and Meryl!” echoed around the vast space, and then bounced back off the fifty-foot ceiling.

“So now sit and enjoy,” said Mordy. “And, while you eat, you may expect a little in-house entertainment,” he added, replacing his goblet on the tablecloth and pointing to the far end of the hall, where a screen of cinematic dimensions was sliding incongruously into place.

“Porno?” said Noddy, who’d liked the Pouilly-Fumé so much he had already had his glass refilled twice by Françoise, the prettiest of the maids.

“One way of looking at it, old man. You will see... you will see. Now do pay these little quail chappies the attention they deserve, eh?”

“Rauf, rauf,” said Arnaud, licking at his bowl.

“Prob’bly won’t be till we’re well past the boar and onto dessert the PM will speak to us,” Mordy added.

“PM of France?” said Rodney Snipes, already the worse for wear after three goblets of Pinot Noir.

“Of Great Britain, mon vieux. Who will shortly be joining us with news I am sure will interest you.”

“Biffo?” said Rodney.

“The same. Sources tell me he is about to make the speech of his life.”

“And we’ll see it?”

Hand In Glove

By Paddy Bostock

Humor/Adventure

Cover art by Richard Stroud

Buy Link

PI Dr Jake Flintlock and his sidekick Dr Bum Park are inveigled by American theater director Chuck Cinzano into the investigation of a severed hand in a baseball glove on Primrose Hill, London. The assignment morphs into a murder case as Chuck is “stabbed to death” in Jake’s home. Having flown to Sausalito, CA, Jake and Bum begin to suspect they are being used as actors in a play. Yet, a real crime has been committed and somehow the culprit has to be found.

Excerpt:

Primrose Hill, London NW1, on the first summer Saturday the mercury hit twenty-five degrees was not the place for me. Packed as it was with semi-naked people, the place looked more like the Costa del Sol in August. Bad decision, Jake! Better to have stayed at home and watched telly, but by then it was too late. There is no way Binkey can be dragged out of a park he’s already in. Hell to play as he wraps his lead around a tree and performs his idea of a sit-in, bottom rooted to the grass and forepaws planted in defiance while baring his teeth at passersby in what he thinks of as his wolf impression. Which I tell him makes him look at best mental, but you can see how passersby might feel differently when faced with a Dachshund/Doberman cross pretending to be a wolf; frightened, for example. Not that Binkey has ever bitten a passerby, you understand; just likes them to think he might. So it was I was left with little choice but to continue indulging Binkey’s walkie needs and trudge on through the mass of unedifying man—and womankind.

All the ones around me were currently turned to the sun spit-roasting themselves at a future cost to the National Health Service in carcinoma treatment of squillions, money the NHS couldn’t afford because the bankers had stolen it all and the government didn’t dare ask for it back. As I had time and again in my years on the planet, I asked myself what the world was coming to, a thought I shared with Binkey as we stumbled through the dumbed-down, bunkered-in, smartphone-silly, flabby flotsam of the second decade of the twenty-first century.

“Bloody hell, Binkey,” I commented close to the top of the hill, narrowly avoiding the head of a whale-like German lying—well, more like floundering—on his stomach as he tried to capture on his iPad the splendour of the cityscape laid out beneath him: the London Eye, the Sexy Gherkin, the Shard, all of that. I knew the whale was German from the way he kept re-angling his iPad to get his picture exactly right and grunting, “Vorsprung durch Technik.”

“You wonder what a Martian expeditionary commander would make of this lot, don’t you?” I asked Binkey. “Probably call home straight away and tell his boss to cancel invasion plans in case the troops catch something nasty. Advise him to check out black holes instead.”

“Raaafff, raaafff!” Binkey said from the other end of his lead, but I could tell from the way he was tugging towards an—illegal!—barbie a few yards away from the German’s head my analysis of the planet’s problems wasn’t the cause of his excitement. What was interesting Binkey more than self-induced Armageddon were the sausages currently turning the same shade as the people cooking them.

“Binkey, heel,” I commanded.

Fat chance. Binkey doesn’t obey any commands except Walkies, Din-Dins and Bikkies, which strictly speaking aren’t commands at all. More like offers.

“HEEL!” I nonetheless repeated pointlessly...which was when the really bad thing had to happen.

Call it catastrophe theory, call it nemesis, call it anything you like, but I ask you: What ungodly presence was it which had to inspire the German, at that very moment, to kick out an excited leg at the capture of the pic he doubtless hoped would soon grace the cover of a Der Spiegel and thereby cause me to trip and let go of Binkey’s lead such that the freed beast made a bee-line for the barbie—tended as it turned out by a band of Russians—piss on it, scarf all the sausages, and then run away to the other side of the hill to take part in a baseball game organised by American dads for their cutesy Major-League-wannabe progeny...and steal their ball? I mean, life’s hard enough, right?

Foot Soldiers

By Paddy Bostock

Action/Humour, 452 pages

Cover art by Richard Stroud

Blurb: Outraged at the market economic policies adopted by their university, the Podiatry department kidnap a senior academic in protest. The chance coincidence of the interests of the gutter press, Welsh Freedom Fighters, and a Prime Minister struggling for re-election ensures a minor campus story escalates into cataclysmic national proportions.

Excerpt: Professor Marvyn "Clyde" Zinkin was furious, an increasingly frequent phenomenon since his move to the UK, and one that was starting to cause him concern. Stateside, his blood-pressure had been consistently described by doctors as that of a "resting athlete," but now he reckoned it closely resembled that of a kangaroo ice-dancing.

"Whaddya mean the Podricyclists ain't buying it?" he spat at Dr. Malcolm Moon, the bearer of bad tidings, who was teetering at the edge of the Presidential-style cherrywood desk, his bony, blanched knuckles pressed into the gleaming surface for support, wondering how long he would be able to hold onto his breakfast.

"The hell they ain't. The other damn Ps bought it and so will they," Clyde bellowed, jerking his tanned quarterback frame forwards from its high-backed, black-leather swivel so the Charlton Heston torso beneath his white button-down shirt covered the major part of the desktop, and the ice-blue eyes above the remoulded nose and the cosmetic Rock Hudson cleft chin were only withering inches away from Dr. Moon's watery yellow irises.

"An' you better believe it, Mal. Toe-pickers?" he said, springing from his chair, grabbing a remote from the back pocket of his specially imported Lee jeans-the ones that built America-and marching across to his full-wall, Power Point display on which, alphabetically arranged, were all the subjects he had already axed from the university's once wide-ranging offer.

"Philosophics bought it," he told the cringing don, who had begun to gulp much in the manner of a haddock out of water. "Psychiatrosis bought it. Psychologomy bought it. Pekingese bought it..."

Cantonese, Professor Zinkin," Malcolm corrected, pedantry surfacing even in his current anguish.

"Political Studies bought it. Practically all the goddammed Ps bought it. An' now you're here to tell me Podricyclists ain't buying it?" Clyde fumed, oblivious to the intervention and zapping at the remote to indicate the spaces where once seminal subjects featured as death masks and PODIATRY was lit up in red with a skull and crossbones flashing over it in black.

"They are very reluctant, Professor, given the potential financial benefits they claim to be inherent in the treatment of feet, and also the principle of the matter," Moon said before his knees gave way and he collapsed onto the single wooden stool Zinkin allowed for petitioners on the opposite side of the Presidential cherrywood number.

"The As bought it…Angly Saxonics, Anthropologism, Archaeologics…all those guys went for the deal big ways. The Bs...the Cs...the Ds, all the way through to the goddam Ps," Clyde said, whipping the remote along the defunct subject line of his projection-analysis screen. "So why not the goddam Podricyclicists?" he barked, returning to his swivel, appraising his computer briefly before hitting the auto-piss-off button on a series of e-mails, and then staring down at Malcolm Moon.

"Did I say you could sit, Mal?"

"I felt I needed to, sir."

"'Nother weak-kneed Brit, huh? You guys gonna be the death of me.

For the Love of a Woman

By Paddy Bostock

Suspense/Thriller, 478 pages

Cover art by Richard Stroud

Ravaged by sun, mosquitoes and his partner Claudia’s extended family while on a summer holiday to seaside Italy, PI Jake Flintlock is keen—despite having been asked to stay to solve a local murder—to return to London for good. But then, after a second murder, he and his PI associate Bum Park are made an offer they can’t refuse and once in Rome, discover a whole new meaning to the words la famiglia

But even on the open road, the ride was far from smooth given the absence of rear springs and the smell of first searing rubber, and then sparks flying from the stripped metal of the wheel beneath us. Bum became very tetchy.

Excerpt:

Bum was piqued at the lost opportunity to help a hippy nun rediscover her sexuality, but the sight of a load of blokes striding towards us in blue-and-yellow striped knickerbockers wielding pikestaffs changed his mind smartish. Bum had never seen mediaeval people.

“Wh-who the f-fuck are those guys?” he ululated.

“The Swiss,” I said.

“Swiss?”

“Yes.”

“I thought Swiss dressed in leather pants, milked cows, and were, like, peaceful. These guys look like clowns wid a bad attitude. An’ also wid lances? Boy, oh boy,” he said, donning his undertaker outfit and leaping out through the tailgate.

“Next thing I hear we gonna be lion food too,” he shouted back at me from the pavement. “Whut kinda damn country is this?”

“Italy,” I said, as I joined him and pulled the top-hat veil over my face. “Run!”

And that’s what we did, leaving poor old Massimo all alone to fight his own battles with the police, the Schwizzers, and the rabid crowd of tourists and Christians. It wasn’t until we hit the Piazza Venezia that we stopped to draw breath and ask directions to the Spanish Steps.

~ * ~

Not that our panic was strictly necessary. It wasn’t until long after the case was over and I was back home ensconced in my TV chair watching Liverpool unaccountably losing 2-0 to AS Roma at half time in a European qualifier that the truth hit home.

“Bugger,” I was moaning as the adverts came on and I was levering myself up to go in search of another can of hope-inspiring Carlsberg. But, in mid-lever, I was stopped in my tracks as the screen filled with the exact scene we had so hurriedly vacated all those months ago. Cleverly spliced, edited, digitally enhanced, reduced to only thirty seconds, but was this a déjà vu or was this a déjà vu?

“Bloody hell,” I said collapsing back in my chair and gawping as two blokes dressed as undertakers are seen leaping from a hearse and doing a runner downtown from the Colosseum as a load of Swiss Guards, cops, tourists and sexy-looking Christians gaze in awe at their retreating figures while licking at monster chocolate and vanilla ice creams with cherries on the top.

I was still gawping as the action was replaced by a close-up of the ice cream and a smarmy voice-over saying: “The new Cornetto from Walls. To die for!”

“Nnnngg?” I said, the logic not stacking up. And not only the gobbledigook of the grab-phrase. The illogic of the whole damn thing. We’d been outside the Colosseum by accident, hadn’t we? So how come...?

I still don’t know the answer to this conundrum. Maybe the crew had been intending to film an advert for anti-papal condoms when we just happened along and then postmodernly rearranged the shoot according to contingent circumstances. Who knew?