Oh glorious Mr Key! writes Tim Thurn – is he being obsequious or sarcastic? It’s hard to tell – It was fascinating to read about the retired blacksmiths Bim, Bam, and Nat yesterday, and I was wondering if you had any further information about them.

Well, I don’t, Tim, but I know a man who does, as they say. For no less a blockbusterist than Pebblehead has recently published a thumping great triple biography, entitled Retired Blacksmiths! The True Story Of Bim And Bam And Nat, and a cracking good read it is. In fact, it was my source for that business about the goblin colour coding, a full account of which appears in Chapter XXXVIII, and then again, almost word for word, in Chapter XCIV. One could be forgiven for thinking that Pebblehead completely forgot what he had written earlier. It would not be the first time. Whole swathes of his potted history of jugged hare recipes, Jugged!, are repeated more than once in the book, having already appeared in earlier volumes in the Pebblehead oeuvre, one a history of jugs and the other an encyclopaedia of hares. This is why he is dismissed as a hack.

Hack or no, you or I would sell our grandmother’s bones to achieve his sales figures. Retired Blacksmiths! has only been in the shops for a week, and has already sold more copies than there are visible stars in the sky. And deservedly so, for in spite of the fact that his prose is repetitive and slapdash and descends at times into mawkishness, Pebblehead wrings from his subjects a tale well worth the telling.

We learn, for example, about the lives of the threesome before their retirement. There is Bim, at the random grim forge, fettling for a great grey drayhorse his bright and battering sandal! And there is Bam, also at a random grim forge, also fettling. And Nat, too, at the next forge along the lane, and he too fettling, as the sun beats down on a rustic scene redolent of Lark Rise To Candleford. Pebblehead gives us so much detail about random grim forges and the fettling of bright and battering sandals for great grey drayhorses that the reader could, with confidence, given an anvil and a few tools, set up their own smithy’s. I did, before I had even finished reading the book. Clang clang clang, that was the sound clanging from my chalet, as sparks flew and a line of great grey drayhorses formed outside, awaiting their bright and battering sandals. My neighbours were a great help, filling nosebags with hay for the horses, combing their manes, and brushing their fetlocks with horse-brushes. So busy was I fettling and smithying that I did not have any time to finish reading Pebblehead’s book, though my place is marked. I marked it, not with a standard bookmark, of flimsy cardboard, but with a great iron slab, beaten flat upon my anvil, bright and battering.

So I have not yet read beyond the point where, newly retired, Bim and Bam and Nat are co-opted onto the World Council of Goblins and set to work on their colour coding scheme. A scan of the contents page, however, suggests that there are thrills and spills aplenty still to come, including Bim’s involvement in the Profumo affair, Bam taking a dip in the Bosphorus, and Nat choking on a mouthful of genetically-modified spinach. When I have finished fettling all those great grey drayhorses lined up along the lane, waiting patiently, patiently, I shall return to the book, and tell you what more I learn about the three retired blacksmiths, their doings, their dreams, their pangs, and their dotage.

“In the dying hours of the year, in a foul and ill-lit alleyway, a raddled roué, staggering out of a den of vice, was set upon by a ruffian. The ruffian biffed the roué upon the bonce, and kicked him on the shins, just above his spats, and thumped him in the stomach, and the roué crumpled to the ground, winded and helpless in the noisome filth. Then the ruffian stamped his big black boot upon the roué’s biffed bonce, and spat upon his person, and stalked off down the alleyway into the night. And soon thereafter came the pealing of bells, ringing in the new year, and from a clump of dark trees in the park, the hooting of an owl.”

Thus begins Pebblehead’s paperback potboiler The Ruffian Biffo, His Book, surely the most relentlessly violent novel ever published. Its four hundred pages consist of little more than descriptions of the ruffian Biffo biffing and kicking and punching and thumping a series of victims, from the raddled roué staggering from a den of vice to a preening fop on a roister doister, a dandy in the doorway of a bordello, a macaroni on horseback and a pantalooned magnifico on his way to un ballo en maschera.

Interspersed with these almost identical scenes, Pebblehead makes a few half-witted attempts to probe the interior life of his ruffianly protagonist. Biffo, we are told, is variously “a card-carrying communist”, “devoted to his dear old mum”, and “a wizard at the loom”. To be fair, there is one lengthy and anomalous passage (pp. 103-149) where Biffo weaves a blanket for his mother, a blanket emblazoned with a hammer-and-sickle and a daringly avant-garde portrait of Stalin.

In an interview, Pebblehead did not claim, as one might have expected him to, that this scene – beautifully written and astonishing in its detail of blanket-weaving and communist ideology – is the “heart of the novel”. In fact he was quite shameless in his insistence that Biffo’s biffings and kickings and punchings and thumpings are what the book is “about”, adding that he only threw in the other material because he had a head cold and drank too many beakers of Lemsip.

It is difficult to know what to make of the book, but like all Pebblehead’s paperback potboilers, it is a bestseller. Apparently, he plans to follow it up with a spin-off about the raddled roué, following his debauches in the weeks leading up to the fateful encounter with Biffo. “I am hoping,” announced the writer from his chalet o’ prose, “That the next book will prove to be the most relentlessly debauched novel ever published. After that I shall move on to a mawkish and vapid heist ‘n’ espionage romantic science fiction teenage detective blockbuster, with vampires.”

Father Ninian Tonguelash, the Jesuit priest and self-styled “Soutane-Attired Nemesis of Sea Monsters” who appeared in my dream yesterday, was, I would have you know, a real historical figure. He is often thought to be fictional, probably because the only reliable biography we have of him, by Pebblehead père, was published in the form of a series of short episodes between the covers of pulp magazines such as Mildly Alarming Stories!, Yarns That Might Raise Your Blood Pressure Just A Tad, and Vaguely Disquieting Tales. That the various scattered pieces were never brought together as a proper book is one of literature’s, indeed life’s, great tragedies, and the blame must lie squarely with Pebblehead père himself. For all his learning and wisdom and panache as a biographer, he was a very bewildering person. Even just walking down the street, he left a swathe of boggle-eyed bewilderment in his wake, and the captains of ships were ever reluctant to have him aboard their pleasure steamers.

Bewildering, too, is his treatment of the life of Father Tonguelash, quite apart from its being broken up into bits and published in magazines designed for a readership of the semi-literate and the timid and the nerve-bejangled. Although what research has been done seems to confirm that Pebblehead père‘s accounts are historically accurate, indeed devastatingly so, each episode as written is almost identical. The general schema is as follows:

1. Father Ninian Tonguelash has just finished saying Mass when an urchin sprints panting into the vestry to announce that a sea monster has been sighted. Either a ship or a boat or a coastal hamlet is imperilled.

2. Without stopping to ask any questions – even something as basic as in which direction he should speed – Father Tonguelash grabs a harpoon and a crucifix and charges out into the wild and windy shoreland. It is invariably wild and windy.

3. After a little while of harum scarum scampering, the priest stops, as Christ stopped at Eboli, and, all windswept and resolute, takes from his pocket a volume of poems by his friend and colleague Father Gerard Manley Hopkins. He opens the book at random and declaims a poem, shouting into the wind. Declaiming done, he returns the book to his pocket, makes the sign of the cross, and scampers onward. The panting urchin who brought the message of sea monster peril has now had time to catch up with the priest, and sticks close to his heels.

4. Father Ninian arrives at the scene of imperilment and confronts the sea monster. He is absolutely fearless. “I am attired in the soutane of a Jesuit, and I am your Nemesis!” he cries. At this point the sea monster usually makes a gurgling sound we are led to interpret as a plea for God’s ineffable mercy. But Father Ninian shows none. He hands the crucifix to the panting urchin, telling the lad to brandish it at the sea monster. Then he launches the harpoon, with unerring accuracy, felling the sea monster instantly.

5. It is an interesting point that all of the sea monsters harpooned by the Jesuit were of the kind that, when struck, shrivel up and vanish in a puff of cloudy gaseous green vapour.

6. Father Tonguelash reels in his harpoon, pats the panting urchin on the head, retrieves his crucifix, and acknowledges the grovelling gratitude of those whose imperilment he has quashed, be they the crew of a ship or a boat or the peasant inhabitants of a coastal hamlet.

7. As the priest wends his way back to his vestry, Pebblehead père does three things. He makes note, based upon what sources he never reveals, of all the types of birds in the sky and perched upon branches which the Jesuit, were he looking, would see upon his journey. He makes some attempt, not always successfully, to elucidate various sea monster references hidden in the text of the Gerard Manley Hopkins poem declaimed by Father Tonguelash earlier in the episode. Lastly, and characteristically, he ends each piece with a flourish of distinctively bewildering prose.

As a tot, Pebblehead fils, the bestselling paperbackist, was taught this “seven-point plan of literary composition”, as his père dubbed it. Careful readers will still find traces of the technique in some of the potboilers that pour out of the “chalet o’ prose” day after day. Consider, for example, even so recent a blockbuster as The Jesuit And The Sea Serpent which follows the pattern almost exactly, despite being over a thousand pages fat, with a gold-embossed cover making it suitable for airport book kiosks.

The Man Who Ate His Own Head is the new paperback potboiler by Pebblehead, the latest in his series of novellas featuring “Being Of The Future” David Blunkett. The fictional superperson ought not, of course, be confused with the Labour politician of the same name, though some people do get them mixed up. Much the same collision of political fact and speculative fiction occurs in Norman Spinrad’s “agonizing science fiction adventure novel” of 1967, Agent Of Chaos, in which, to quote the back cover blurb, “The scene [is] Dome One, Mars. The terrible dictatorship ruling the planet was the Brotherhood of Assassins, and Boris Johnson, head of the Democratic League was plotting to overthrow the Hegemony and to restore democratic rule. The Hegemony, that mysterious group that controls the entire solar system, was now threatening to control the entire human race and render Man extinct! The entire galaxy in chaos; now bloodshed, then infinity…?” (You can read more about fictive Boris Johnson here.)

In The Man Who Ate His Own Head, the Being Of The Future sits down at some sort of futuristic dinner table, picks up his futuristic knife and futuristic fork, and tucks in to a futuristic meal piled on his futuristic plate. It is unclear what is so futuristic about the meal, as it consists of peas and gravy and jugged hare and cauliflower and cream crackers. Be that as it may, a robot valet appears at Blunkett’s side and, through some form of futuristic mind control, persuades him to eat his own head. This he accomplishes, though not without difficulty, and Pebblehead is very sketchy about the precise sequence of events.

I will not give away the ending. Suffice it to say that the paperbackist unleashes some of his finest narrative pyrotechnics, and we are introduced, at the last, to the Being Of The Future’s futuristic guide dog, Skippy, with the clear indication that this thousand-eyed zinc, tin, titanium, bakelite, and leather hound, stuffed with excelsior, will feature in the sequel, due out next week. Even as I write, Pebblehead is tapping away in his chalet o’ prose, brow furrowed, pipe clenched in his infected teeth.

Burrowing through the dust-caked and tottering piles in Old Pa Dustcake’s secondhand bookshop the other day, I was delighted to light upon a copy of Pebblehead’s absurdly precocious autobiography I, Pebblehead! Published when he was still wet behind the ears, it was his first bestselling paperback. The fact that he was completely unknown to the world when he wrote it, and had lived so short and uneventful a life up to that point, makes its astounding success all the more bewildering. The prose is callow, clunky, and at times incoherent, the narrative devoid of incident save for the famous hydroelectric power station picnic explosion disaster and its aftermath, to which an entire, lengthy chapter is devoted. Yet the presses kept rolling as more and more copies had to be printed to satisfy the public’s seemingly hysterical demand. One observer calculated that more copies were sold than there are stars in the heavens. That being so, one might think it would be an easy title to track down, in shops such as Old Pa Dustcake’s, even so many years after publication. But one hardly ever sees a copy for sale. One explanation, which I find quite convincing, is that a flaw in the binding caused the majority of the books to fall apart when touched by human skin. Luckily, when I was rummaging in the shop, I was wearing my sinister black mittens, simply to strike a pose, you understand.

In a piece marking the death, at 85, of General Alexander Haig, Christopher Hitchens described the fifty-ninth US Secretary of State as a “slobbering dauphin”. This phrase will be more familiar to Hooting Yard readers as the one commonly used to refer to Prince Fulgencio’s sickly, pipsqueak son and heir, whose official title was His Luminous Magnificence The Princeling Balthazar Clovis Agamemnon De Pig De Pig Of Oogah And Sluice In The Islands Of Widdecombe Sound. That was what it said on his badge. But everybody, including Prince Fulgencio himself, called him the slobbering dauphin, when they were talking about him or, indeed, talking to him.

A typical exchange might go as follows:

Prince Fulgencio : Good grief! Ever since we arrived here at Fort Hoity where I am to review my trooplets and cut a princely dash, you, slobbering dauphin, have been slobbering away and quite taking the shine off my regal jib.

The Princeling : Slobber slobber slobber.

Prince Fulgencio : There, you are at it again! Yes, slobbering dauphin, I am slapping my forehead hard, for you leave me at my wits’ end. Perhaps it is your forehead I ought to be slapping, if I did not think doing so would make you slobber all the more!

The Princeling : Slobber slobber slobber.

Prince Fulgencio : There is only one thing for it! While I remain here at Fort Hoity I must have you out of my sight, so you must go to Fort Toity, a mile or two yonder across the glinka, and stay put. You may take a little groupuscule of henchpersons with you. Now hie thee hence, slobbering dauphin!

Thus is explained the otherwise puzzling fact that the spindly and sickly and slobbering dauphin found himself, that long hot summer, in sole command of Fort Toity. Freed from the repressive influence of his loathsome Papa, the Princeling’s slobberings grew fewer, and on some days he barely slobbered at all. Though there was, at Fort Toity as at Fort Hoity, a full complement of domestic staff, he spent much of his time in the first few days buffing the crenellations with a rag, until they glistened. When this activity exhausted his weedy constitution, the Princeling sprawled pallid and wan upon cushions, on a balcony, gazing for hours at the desolate glinka, with its few scattered clumps of lightning-blasted shrubbery and, dotted here and there, yawning pits of doom into which would topple, from time to time, such small blind stupid furry creatures as had strayed from their nestings and burrows in search of food. The sun was immense, and golden.

In his paperback potted biography of the Princeling, Pebblehead is at pains to point out that the slobbering dauphin’s balcony cushions were uncomfortable, and thus that his lolling upon them for untold hours was a kind of penitence. But penitence for what? Pebblehead does not say, at least not explicitly. At the time of the Fort Toity summer, the Princeling was but a pipsqueak youth, and had not the years behind him to have drummed up the kind of catalogue of crimes other writers have imputed to him, confusing him perhaps with his black-hearted father, or even perhaps with the deranged killer Babinsky, to whom, in later life, when he had grown an impressive walrus moustache, the Princeling bore more than a passing resemblance. Indeed, it became a tactic of Babinsky’s, whenever the coppers were closing in on him, to slobber, the better to outwit them. Certainly we have not one whit of evidence that the slobbering dauphin was involved in the series of outrages that took place in and around the glinka in the months before he was installed at Fort Toity. In any case, even had he harboured a desire to wipe out great swathes of peasantry, how likely is it that he would have crept about from place to place poisoning wells, when all he need do, as Princeling, was to drop a word in his father’s ear? Prince Fulgencio was always looking for any excuse to issue a ukase to his henchpersons and to have them clattering about the place on their fine ferocious horses bringing death and ruination in their wake. That was the kind of Prince he was, those the kind of henchpersons.

It is possible that Pebblehead mistranslated the ancient documents, getting “uncomfortable cushions” where he ought to have had “gorgeous embroidered pillows stuffed with duck down and a new kind of foam material soft as marshmallow”. The Princeling’s own jottings give no sense that he was consumed by guilt and the desire for uncomfortable cushion penitence, though they are difficult to read, because his slobbering was always at its most slobbery when he was writing, even during that blazing Fort Toity summer, when he slobbered less in general.

There was an amusing fashion, for a brief period in the latter half of the last century, for wealthy beat music combos to decamp to chateaux, there to engage in the dual activities of high debauch and the waxing of their latest disc. As we know full well, there is nothing new under the sun, that immense and golden orb that beat down, once, upon the desolate glinka and upon the balcony where the slobbering dauphin sprawled upon his cushions. And one blazing noon, his brain grown hot, the Princeling had a sudden thought, and clapped his hands to summon a henchperson.

The Princeling : Today I am able to stop slobbering long enough to speak coherently, Arpad. [For the henchperson’s name was Arpad.] My brain is hot, and I have a sudden thought. I want you to go bustling about the villages on the edges of the glinka and round up some musicians. Players on the sackbut and shawm and pipe and drum and what have you. Bring them to me, at once!

Arpad : It will be enacted, O slobbering dauphin.

Arpad the henchperson was a frighteningly efficient fellow, and no sooner had he been given his orders than he was off, on a cart drawn by several horses borrowed from Prince Fulgencio’s magnificent horsery at Fort Hoity. As Pebblehead pointed out, for all his evil ways, Prince Fulgencio had done much to eradicate sickness among his steeds, and the Fort Hoity horsery proudly proclaimed itself to be free of glanders, headshaking, lethal white syndrome, mud fever, contagious equine metritis, rainscald, strangles, quiltor, hereditary equine regional dermal asthenia, choke, grass sickness, recurrent airway obstruction, cerebellar abiotrophy, lavender foal syndrome, pythiosis, poll evil, and many another common horse disease. So healthy and vigorous were the horses pulling his cart that Arpad made the rounds of the villages in a single afternoon, and returned to Fort Toity at dusk with various sackbuttists and shawmists and pipers and drummers, to the unbridled delight of the Princeling, who cut some capers and slobbered, and rewarded Arpad with a personal picnic basket.

So happy was the Princeling that his slobbering became uncontrollable, and he had to write down his instructions for the musicians, with Arpad at his side mopping the slobber into a cup so it did not drip upon the vellum. Although the original is lost, Pebblehead was able to reconstruct the Princeling’s scribble using the technique known as “boggle-eyed hallucinatory scribble reconstruction”, sitting in a darkened room kept at a constant chill, and with beetles scurrying across the floor. The bestselling paperbackist actually wrote two entirely different versions, because he was enjoying himself so much, but only one is suitable for family reading. According to Pebblehead, this is what the slobbering dauphin wrote:

While I was buffing the crenellations with a rag, and more so when I was just lying sprawled on cushions on the balcony gazing upon the desolation of the glinka, all the while I have been hearing noises in my head. Noises, I say? No, music, the music of the spheres, or at least between my ears. Now, I charge you raggle-taggle band of players to make this music known to the world outside my head, so others, including Arpad here, and the other henchpersons, and my father’s majestic horses, and the domestic staff, and all who dwell in Fort Toity, and beyond, beyond the glinka, in the villages from whence you came, and elsewhere, may hear it. For it is music destined to be immortal. It will outlast me, as it will outlast my terrible reproachful father, Prince Fulgencio, as it will outlast even you, who play it. For I command also Arpad, with or without the help of his fellow henchpersons, to devise, from polished magnetic pebbles and pointy bits of tin and interlocking wheels and belts made from the stretchy sinewy guts of badgers and the like, an engine to entrap and then to recreate this music, over and over again, so you need no longer play it and may begone from Fort Toity and return to your villages. So, begin to play upon your sackbuts and shawms and pipes and drums, and I will direct and guide you by gesticulation of my arms and legs and movements of my brow, and by slobbering.

The music thus created, by fits and starts and with much agon, sounded remarkably like the genre we know today as “smooth death metal”. Before summer’s end, it was blasted by Arpad’s engine across the glinka, from dawn to dusk, occasionally jaunty, sometimes pounding, but mostly just smooth and deathly and metallic, just as the slobbering dauphin heard it inside his head.

But the summer ended, as summers will, and one morning Prince Fulgencio came to Fort Toity, roaring his head off, on horseback, flanked by a trooplet of brutish henchpersons.

Prince Fulgencio : Well, slobbering dauphin, I have shut up Fort Hoity for the bleaker months, and am set upon a long and arduous journey to Castle Blunkett, there to hole up for the winter tormenting the peasantry and eradicating disease among the horses and guide dogs. I wish you to accompany me, for so vast is the castle that you can have your own wing to slobber in, slobber as you will.

The Princeling :  Slobber slobber slobber.

Then came a wind such as swept across the glinka on autumnal mornings, a bitter wind. Arpad helped the weedy Princeling up on to a horse, and off he rode, slobbering onto the horse’s magnificent shining mane, riding into the wind.

One of the most common difficulties facing newcomers to the teachings of Trebizondo Culpeper is the complete absence, anywhere, of boogie, coupled with the almost terrifying prevalence, throughout, of woogie.

In his magisterial if incoherent Syncretic Glossary Of The “Way” Of Trebizondo Culpeper, J K Pox devotes some three hundred pages to what he calls “the boogie-woogie conundrum”. One can argue that there is no conundrum, but that doesn’t stop Pox harping on about it. As ever, he is flamboyant, and one must admire his refusal to define his terms, as if in doing so the magic, if magic it is, would leach out of them.

“When thunder claps and wolves howl,” he writes, “When the sedge is wither’d on the lake, and gigantic mutant crustaceans come a-clattering on to the sandbanks, then, then! my sweet dear ones, is when we are most tempted to admit into our souls some sort of boogie. Squash the very thought underfoot, as one might a fig during a fig-glut. No, there is not and never has been and never will be boogie, if we follow the Way with eyes bright and brows clean. There is only woogie, blessed, blossoming and blanketing, at once tough as nails and chewy as the king and queen of toffees. So we are taught by Trebizondo Culpeper and so we have embroidered upon our pullovers. Link arms and sing, as snow falls and tinkly things tinkle. Sing!”

Pox does not go on to say what song it is his readers and students should be singing. To do so may have been psychologically impossible for him, for as we know he was, when young, expelled from the Conservatoire before his studies had properly begun, following the incident described in pages 45 to 64 of Pebblehead’s bestselling paperback The Gummed-Up Tuba And The Worm-Eaten Spinet.