• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 877 0

in neighborhoods and genres was for mutual cross-fertilization of ideas, themes and topics. Having something from Vanity close by would, they claimed, “lower the tone of the prose.” Liberal factions within the Council of Genres had attempted a cross-genre experiment and placed The Man Who Died a Lot right into the middle of McEwan on the basis that the localized erudition could only have a bettering effect on the Vanity book. It was a disaster. None of the characters within McEwan would talk to them and even claimed that some descriptive passages had been stolen. It was then that McEwan and the nearby Rushdie and Amis threatened to go on strike and lower their Literary Highbrow Index to a shockingly low 7.2 unless The Man Who Died a Lot was removed. The offending book was gone before teatime, and no one had tried anything since. Vanity’s contribution to Fiction in general was an abundance of cheap labor and the occasional blockbuster, which was accepted onto the island with an apologetic, “Gosh, don’t know how that happened.”

We continued our walk through Conspiracy, past something odd that had been dug up on the Quantock Hills, and Sprockett asked me if I conducted many accident investigations.

“My last investigation was in a book-club edition of Three Men in a Boat, which had sprung a leak,” I told him, “and lost forty thousand gallons of the river Thames as it passed across Crime Noir, where it fell quite helpfully as rain. My theory had been that it was a sticky pressure-relief valve on the comedy induction loops, probably as a result of substandard metaphor building up on the injectors. I penned an exhaustive report to Commander Herring, who congratulated me on my thoroughness but tactfully pointed out that comedy induction loops were not introduced until April 1956—long after the book was built.”

“Oh,” said Sprockett, who perhaps had been expecting a story with a happier ending. “So what had really happened?”

I sighed. “Someone had simply left the plug out of the Thames and it had drained away.”

We walked on in silence for a moment.

“Ma’am, if you would forgive the impertinence, might I place one small condition upon my employment?”

I nodded, so he continued.

“I have an overriding abhorrence for honey. No matter what happens, it always seems to end up in my insides, and it is the very devil to remove. In my last employ, my master insisted upon honey for breakfast, and a small quantity became lodged in my thought cogs. Until steam-cleaned, I became convinced I was the Raja of Sarawak.”

“No honey,” I said. “Promise.”

And so, fully introduced, we talked about the much-heralded and much-delayed introduction of the advanced Duplex-6 clockwork automaton. And, after that, the relative merits of phosphor-bronze over stainless steel for knee joints. So it was that I arrived, thoroughly versed in the Matters of the Cog, at the regional Conspiracy offices a few minutes later.

6.

The Bed-Sitting Room

The ISBN security numbering system achieved little. Thieves simply moved into stealing and trading sections of older books. The members of the Out-of-Print Brigade were furious; after looking forward to a long and happy retirement, they instead found their favorite armchairs pinched from under them as they dozed. Entire books were stripped of all nouns, and in the very worst cases large sections of dramatic irony were hacked from the books and boiled down to extract the raw metaphor, rendering once-fine novels mere husks suitable only for scrapping.

Bradshaw’s BookWorld Companion (14th edition)

The local genre representative was sitting on a wicker chair on the veranda of his office, a clapboard affair that looked much ravaged by overreading. The rep was described as what we termed “UK-6 Aristocracy Dapper-12,” which meant that he had a fine pencil mustache and spoke as though he were from the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art. I told Sprockett to wait for me outside, which he unhesitatingly agreed to do.

The rep did not rise from his chair and instead looked me up and down and then said in a disparaging