Jorge Luis Borges’ tenure as a blind inspector of poultry, while brief, was not without precedent. We recall the case of Pimty, two decades earlier and far, far from Buenos Aires. It may be an exaggeration to dub him, as did Pebblehead in the title of his bestselling paperback biography, The Illustrious Pimty, but that there was a lustre about him cannot be denied, unless you want to start a punch-up. Pimty’s blindness was more Blunketty than Miltonic, he was the sort of man who enraged cows, when he trespassed in their fields, at weekends, carrying a picnic basket, under a thunderous sky, escaping the poultry market with its tin roofs and yelling merchants, his prison in the week, the inspector’s hut, the braille calendar hanging tattered from a nail and the nail rusted, pricking him if he wasn’t careful, blood on his fingers as his hands fumbled delving into a hen’s croup, prodding, inspecting, as he was paid to do, oh and more than generously, he got a fair whack, and he spent it on booze and floozies, they haunted the poultry market, like figures from an early Kirchner, gaudy, angular, themselves sozzled on bathtub gin, sometimes they clucked just like the hens, particularly in the early afternoon, poor Pimty fuddled but up to his duty, tape measure round his neck like a tailor shifting schmutter, god knows why, it wasn’t his job to measure the hens, nor their eggs, they joked he thought it was some kind of loose cravat, as if being blind he wouldn’t know, they should have learned from their failed tricks, those mischievous poulterers, shoving a ball of dough stuck with feathers on the inspector’s table, his rage was as terrible as the cows when he opened the gate of the field with one hand, holding tight to the picnic basket with the other, out in the mist, oblivious of it, but not of the cows that bore down on him, on Saturdays and Sundays when the poultry market was closed, shuttered, a deserted patch of concrete and cement, stray feathers scattered, neglected by the janitor’s broom, the janitor Pimty’s pal, some said his half-brother, deaf as a post where the inspector was blind, they made quite a pair even without the blood tie, always playing card games at lunchtime, rummy and spite and my lady’s bonnet and Croesus, no money ever changing hands, the table rickety, sawdust everywhere, the stove in the corner, rain on the roof, birds pecking grain from the floor, shadow in the hut door of the inspector of inspectors looming, come for the rent and a check up, Pimty defiant, spitting out his words, hair standing on end as if he’d seen a ghost, half these hens are sick, man, what do you expect me to do, have a tot of gin while you tally my ledgers, I have to go and have a word with a man about a Buff Orpington and a Dutch Hookbill, and off Pimty goes, weaving across the familiar yard, sniffing the air, a storm brewing, better put on his sou’wester, yellow as a duck in a nursery book, shiny cardboard pages, stiff, buckled here and there, as you’d expect, he remembered gazing and gazing, rapt, when still so tiny with eyes that worked, before the operation, the surgeon cutting the useless withered nerves and then the blur black, the new life, the hard study, the Poultry Inspection Board, such an easy examination, what’s this, what’s that, this is this sir and that is that sir and a badge for merit, he still wears it, polishes it and buffs it, daily, after breakfast, kippers or bloaters, Schoenberg cassette, Transfigured Night, day too, thinks Pimty, day too, transfigured and transformed, weekday poultry market and weekend picnic, when he gets out, humming as he approaches the gate in the field, beyond which angry cows await him, and he pacifies them, sweet nothings, try the same thing on the hens and there would be mayhem, that much he discovered, one awful Thursday, it was raining then too, and he slipped on straw or grease and gashed his leg, you won’t find a better tourniquet than a tape measure, believe you me, still there was much blood spilled before it was taut, Pimty’s gore, like a rare expensive wine, metallic bouquet, and something in it irresistible to ducks, dozens of them falling upon it like starvelings, splashing about in his blood, the inspector deafened by clucking, thinking I better find out exactly what it is that’s in my veins, I may be a miracle of medical science, who’d have thought, hens maddened by the blood-splattered ducks, shrieking tangles, add in the sirens from the emergency services and you have complete havoc, but Pimty back at the poultry market next morning, behind his table, sticking his fingers up a duck’s fundament, the sense of touch unerring, even through the rubber glove, bright yellow like the rainhat, like the ducks in the nursery book, so much yellow, it was Pierre Bonnard who said you can never have enough yellow, no more yellow for Pimty but the yellow in his brain, remembered yellow, bright enough when he strains the synapses, you can almost hear them ping and twang, if you listen carefully, and Pimty does, he’s all ears, that’s why he hears the enraged cows in the field even before they are enraged, before his thumb clicks open the gate, on picnic days, in sunshine or mist, or once, when his watch stopped, in the middle of the night, high wind, cattle in slumber, owls hooting, Pimty with his rug and hamper, jam sandwiches, fishpaste, cocoa, a drowned beetle in the flask, the janitor never joins him, Greb the janitor, he goes instead on organised picnics for the hard of hearing, to the grounds of castles and stately homes, not cow-strewn fields, always in daylight, light Pimty doesn’t see and hasn’t seen for years, though he senses it on his eternally closed lids, heat and cold, damp and haze, he no longer bothers with the sunglasses he used to sport, frames too heavy on the nose, he smashed them underfoot in a temper, drunk to hell at the time, swigging as he smashed, at the poultry market but off duty, on a Tuesday afternoon, with a floozie on his arm, giggling, egging him on, a bit batty if truth be told, or dotty, that’s the word, fond of the poultry, too fond maybe, in an unseemly way, kept trying to abduct a hen or a duck or a goose, take it home as a pet, oh go on Pimty nobody will miss it, I can call it Flopsy or Clytemnestra and make a pond for it in my bathtub, feed it grain or whatever it eats, I know a grain supplier, a man with a silo, oh pretty please, but for all he was drawn to grandiose debauch Pimty was as conscientious a poultry inspector as the market ever had, and he foiled her kidnaps, every one of them, using his lustre, really quite mysterious, but absolutely effective, going by results, the inspector of inspectors always had a good word for him, back at headquarters, that man Pimty is a bloody marvel, never a day goes by that his poultry inspections aren’t a masterclass in the art, even when he’s sozzled, there is a lustre about him that makes my jaw drop, Pimty never heard any of this, they never invited him to HQ, not even to the cocktail parties, a stuffy bunch, and him shall we say difficult, haphazard in certain settings, liable to break things, jugs, plates, toasters, he was a devil with toasters, rarely invited anywhere, hence the lonely picnics, Pimty in a field beneath the enormous sky, placating angry cows, sprawled on his rug, away from the poultry, maybe that was when he worked at his lustre, it was as if he emitted rays, no, a sheen, unearthly, when he chose to switch it on, which he certainly did when Pebblehead came calling, he’d heard rumours, bustled into the poultry market first thing Monday morning, in cape and spats, entourage of bodyguards, so where’s this blind inspector I’ve been hearing about, tell me dammit, I have a paperback to write, ah good day to you sir, gosh, Pebblehead dumbstruck, slumps in a chair, an assistant takes notes, Pimty all the while inspecting geese and hens and ducks, even a swan, mute, he doubles up on rubber gloves, uses some sort of beam, strange miniature torch, works its controls so so deftly, but the swan is dead, they prosecute the merchant, huge pile of legal papers, even bigger pile of braille for Pimty, big thick sheets, untold thousands of dots, he knows the whole thing backwards, fantastic witness, visits the swan killer in prison, dank cell, no smoking, repent, repent, but we can never have you back at the poultry market, you crossed a line and I drew that line, yes, and it’s indelible, like all my lines, wherever I draw them, he’s babbling, Pimty, making it up as he goes along, to strike the fear of god into the convict, before he’s shipped away, over the sea, to a penal colony, one specially built for bird-killers, rocky and remote, blasted by gales, screeching gulls, auks, guillemots, sky cold and grey and hopeless, place of penitence, prising barnacles from stone for food, all in Pimty’s mind, vengeful, eaten away with hatred, teeming visions, the hen in the brain, oh yes, lustrous, Pebblehead saw that, but he had no idea of Pimty in the round, the whole man, duck messiah, goose god. It is certainly worth reading the biography, soon to be a film, but much of what Pebblehead writes is nonsense. For one thing, Pimty looked absolutely nothing like Anthony Burgess.

The picture above adorns the cover of the latest bestselling paperback by Pebblehead. Entitled Cupboard!, it is a fast-paced and thrill-packed adventure featuring Pebblehead’s recurring hero Dax Manley Hopkins, manly, winsome, beguiled and unflappable. Though the cupboard of the title is singular, there are hundreds, possibly thousands of cupboards in the book, some of which Dax opens to take a look inside at crucial moments in the plot. One such is the cupboard the contents of which are shown, neatly arranged, in the picture. It is called the “L Ron” Cupboard, for reasons which Pebblehead never quite makes explicit, unless I am misreading him. God knows it is easy enough to misread Pebblehead. For all the dash and verve of his effortless prose, the effect is sometimes as if one is reading an inept translation from a language if not quite dead, then at least sick and sprawled ungainly upon an invalid’s mattress.

The objects in the cupboard are, we are told, made of dough and painted with a coating of emulsion. Each has a function which is utterly baffling, at least to Dax, though he has managed to lay his hands on a set of laminated flash cards giving the name of each item. These names are enigmatic. Here they are:

Top shelf, left to right : 1. Bombs a’ Poe. 2. Luxembourg bales. 3. The Kreutzer Sonata. 4. Yoko Eno Bono.

Second shelf, left to right : 5. Eaten in Harbin. 6. La Condoleezza. 7. Gas giant.

Third shelf, left to right : 8. National Cylinder. 9. Weems. 10. Agony in the garden. 11. Gold Diggers of 1933.

Fourth shelf, left to right : 12. Alone and palely loitering. 13. Thou art Pierre Loti, innit.

Bottom shelf, left to right : 14. Bittern storm over Ulm 15. Yeast fixture.

I will not spoil the bestselling paperback for you by telling you what happens when Dax, so manly and winsome and beguiled and unflappable, first opens, then closes the cupboard. (The scene takes place on pp. 409-444.)

Or, the picture might be by Robinet Testard, an image from Matthaeus Platearius’s The Book of Simple Medicine, Ms. Fr. VI n. 1, fol. 166v., c. 1470, St. Petersburg National Library, which I found at Mapping The Marvellous.

Exactly five years ago today, these words were posted in Hooting Yard:

“Remember, remember, the fifth of November, gunpowder, treason and plot. Remember, too, the case of the distressed pig, solved by Special Agent Blot. The distressed pig was found in a rowing boat crossing Tantarabim Lake. Agent Blot swam out to it and fed it with nutritious cake. As the pig grew becalmed Agent Blot took the oars and he rowed to the mud-splattered shore. He hoisted the pig right out of the boat and bedded it down in some straw. Then he plodded his way in his wellington boots to the pig farmer’s hut down the lane, and he felled the brute with a thwack of his fist and bound him up with a chain. Agent Blot dragged the pig farmer off to the prison, bang in the centre of town. And that is why, on November the fifth, the distressed pig did not drown.”

I am pleased to report that the tale so briefly told has been expanded, by bestselling paperbackist Pebblehead no less, into a thumping great airport bookstall paperback potboiler entitled Special Agent Blot And The Distressed Pig! : How A Distressed Pig Was Rescued By Special Agent Blot!

It seems Pebblehead is still managing to avoid the attentions of a copy editor. Those exclamation marks in the title are wholly uncalled-for. Obviously he is trying to drum up excitement in the casual airport bookstall browser, but surely he realises that the name “Pebblehead” alone, emblazoned in glittery glittering glitz upon the cover, is enough to cause perilous palpitations in the hardest of hearts?

Hooting Yard Rating : Sweeping & Magisterial

It is hard to think of an esoteric sect more hidden, more obscure, than the Erk Gah. We know virtually nothing of its membership, its ceremonies and rituals, its raiment and vestments, its perfumes, its symbols, its armaments cache, its hierarchy, its headgear, its idiosyncratic buttoning methods, its potions, its nostrums, its pomposity, its colour schemes, its texts, its insignia, its dietary stringencies, its bucket and spade seaside outings, or its ultimate purpose. Some have suggested that the Erk Gah does not even exist.

One wonders, then, what to make of Evaporated Milk & Ducks’ Blood, the latest bestselling paperback by Pebblehead, with its audacious subtitle The Truth About Erk Gah Revealed! As ever with his ventures into non-fiction, Pebblehead’s prose is breathless and slapdash and at times laughable, but he makes grand claims, and they deserve to be treated seriously. After all, we are unlikely to get a better guide to this mysterious sect, even if it is wholly spurious.

One thing Pebblehead refuses to tell us is from what sources he cobbled his 300-plus pages together. Indeed, one reviewer has already insisted that the book ought to be shelved alongside Fantasy Fiction, that Pebblehead has made the whole thing up. But how would anybody know one way or the other, unless they were a member of the Erk Gah? It may be pertinent that the reviewer in question disguised his identity behind a terrifically-wrought anagram.

But let us look at some of Pebblehead’s claims.

Membership. The Erk Gah has a finite number of members. When one dies – of which, more in a moment – they are replaced by a new recruit. How this newcomer is chosen is an ineffable mystery. It is possible that there are as few as twelve members at any one time, although other estimates give a figure of several thousand. Erk Gah members do not die in the sense that you or I would understand the term. Instead, they are “begusted into flimflam”. Pebblehead does not expand upon this.

Ceremonies And Rituals. The major Erk Gah ceremony is the so-called “knocking about of the ball with the puck”, which as far as one can gather may look to the innocent eye like hockey practice. “Thus,” intones Pebblehead, ominously, “does the sect conceal its existence by creating a facsimile of a well-loved sport which is part of the fabric of our everyday lives, if we are sporty persons of course”. There is another ritual, involving binoculars, promontories, and seabirds, which can be equally misconstrued by the ignorant.

Raiment And Vestments. Unutterably gorgeous, according to Pebblehead, and so stylish that Erk Gah members can be mistaken for dazzling stars of the Riviera set. Apparently, there is something called the cufflink code, but the details of that, too, are an ineffable mystery.

Perfumes. The Erk Gah can be sniffed out, we are told, if one is sensitive to certain vaporous effusions. Pebblehead gets rather tied up in knots trying to explain what on earth he is babbling on about here, and the passage is dense with footnotes. At one point he suggests the scents with which the Erk Gah spray themselves are odourless, which, if true, is either foolish in the extreme or perhaps yet another of those ineffable mysteries.

Symbols. Chiefly pelicans, silkworms, bowls of alphabet soup, chunks of gack, herons, old bakelite wireless sets, dust, corks, bats, cravat pins, big fat magnetic robots, chaffinches, oildrums, pulp, song thrushes, camphor sausages, toadflax, jibs, cloudbursts, mayonnaise, tin tabernacles, blots, mist, and Herculean effort. All these things, with their deep Erk Gah significance, are depicted on a gigantic shield, carted about the countryside at dead of night, by blind devotees. Or so Pebblehead would have us believe.

Armaments Cache. The Erk Gah are fond of Howitzers, and have been known to fire them when unprovoked. If you hear a mysterious explosion in the distance, on a Thursday at dusk, that might be the Erk Gah.

Hierarchy. “There are so many levels,” writes Pebblehead, “So many, many, many levels, gosh, my head is spinning!” Novelty Pebblehead dolls with spinnable heads went on sale in toyshops as part of the publicity for the book, presumably to give some credence to this assertion.

Headgear. Less Riviera set, more grimy peasant. Shapeless, filthy rags puckered up and scrunched and plopped atop the pate. Beetles and other black creeping things scurry among the folds. They can hardly be called hats, but are made by milliners contracted individually by some kind of Erk Gah hat emissary. Whereabouts this position fits within the Hierarchy is moot. Pebblehead’s head was presumably spinning far too rapidly for him to be able to enlighten us. And was the paperbackist himself wearing a sordid Erk Gah hat as he wrote? There are, after all, plenty of corrupt milliners setting up shop in our streets, more’s the pity.

Idiosyncratic Buttoning Methods. “All this buttoning and unbuttoning!” wrote the anonymous 18th century suicide. Was he or she a member of the Erk Gah, practising auto-begustment into flimflam? Pebblehead does not tell us, probably because he doesn’t know. But he does devote an excruciating forty pages of his book to the matter of buttons and buttoning and unbuttoning and unbuttons. Excruciating, because here his prose it at its sloppiest, and it is impossible to make head nor tail of what he is trying to say. I, for one, would have been interested in the Erk Gah concept of the unbutton, for example, “that which is not, and cannot be, a button, on any possible planet”.

Potions. The most popular of Erk Gah potions appears to be a decoction of evaporated milk and ducks’ blood, hence the title of Pebblehead’s tome. This mixture is drunk from lovely goblets, or from paper cups, depending upon the alignment of the stars and the idiosyncratic buttoning method in use at the time. Where the devotees get all the ducks’ blood from is an ineffable mystery, as they seem not to approve of the slaughter of ducks or of anything else which paddles in ponds. There is another potion, of evaporated milk without the commingling of ducks’ blood, of which the Erk Gah are equally fond.

Nostrums. Pebblehead alludes to a bulky collection of nostrums which the Erk Gah are said to apply to common agues. Many of these remedies are of a purgative effect, which I am afraid conjures up the image of a troop of sectaries throwing up all over the place, and an overpowering stink of regurgitated evaporated milk and ducks’ blood. I looked up “mops” and “disinfectant” in the index, but neither word appears there. In fact, the index is a very shoddy piece of work, and I think it may have been taken from another book entirely. Pebblehead has done this before, of course, through either indolence or stupidity.

Pomposity. There is an inherent pomposity in most occult and esoteric sects, acting as a sort of protective veneer. Without pomp, the edifice might crumble, and crumblement must be avoided at all costs.

Colour Schemes. Mostly sepia.

Texts. One of Pebblehead’s most startling discoveries is that a list of the foundational texts of the Erk Gah is identical in every particular to a list of volumes stolen over a period of five years from the Tundist Owl Library. We know that the Tundists were so enraged by the thefts that they sent a gang of merciless cut-throats in search of the culprits, but the fact that the books were never returned to the library suggests that the Erk Gah, if indeed the thieves were among their number, must have outwitted the Tundist avengers. This ought not be surprising, Recent studies have shown that, contrary to myth, the Tundists were a witless and noodle-brained bunch, many of whom did not even know what an owl was, despite the comprehensive collection of owly prose in their library. But if the basic texts of the Erk Gah are indeed originally Tundist, are they a mere subsect? That is a question to which, one hopes, a writer more scholarly and less populist than Pebblehead will address themselves, though the survival rate of authors investigating Tundism is calamitously low, and much blood has been spilt, not all of it the blood of ducks.

Insignia. Pebblehead makes a cack-handed attempt to sketch the insignia of the Erk Gah on the frontispiece of his book. It looks as if he used crayons. A six-year-old would have made a better fist of it.

Dietary Stringencies. What foodstuffs, we might ask, do the Erk Gah wash down with their evaporated milk and ducks’ blood potions? The answer, according to Pebblehead, is “anything from the tuber family” and “anything with a –hip or –wort suffix”. That seems pretty stringent to me, but then I’ll eat anything, as will Pebblehead himself. I had dinner with him a few weeks ago and we scoffed a surfeit of lampreys and more bloaters than his dining table could support. He had to have it shored up with cast iron props.

Bucket And Spade Seaside Outings. An endearing feature of the Erk Gah is their predilection for bucket and spade seaside outings. Less endearing – much less endearing – is that their favoured destination is the foul and filthy fishing port of O’Houlihan’s Wharf. It is a curious place to rattle towards on the train, waving one’s bucket and spade cheerily out the window, for of course there is no sandy beach there, merely a couple of rotting jetties built upon squelchy oozing mud, mud that is home to disgusting squirmy wriggling things which are surely abominations in the sight of God. And yet year after year the Erk Gah descend upon this briny hellhole, mad with glee. What they actually do with their buckets and spades when they get there does not bear thinking about. The most Pebblehead will divulge is that shutters go up in the whelk-encrusted hovels, the streets empty, and a fug of eerie mist falls upon the port.

Ultimate Purpose. This, of course, as Pebblehead readily admits, is the final ineffable mystery of the Erk Gah. It brings his book to a limp and unsatisfactory ending, which he tries to bolster by dazzling the reader with vividness. But Pebblehead doesn’t really do vivid, at least not in his non-fiction, and the resulting closing paragraphs are pitiable. The reader senses that he knows this, which is why in a last desperate lunge at thrillsomeness, Pebblehead chucks in an extremely potted pen-portrait of his favourite pig. It is, he says, “a committed pig”.

Further Reading. A rival account of the Erk Gah, which differs from Pebblehead’s book in every single detail, can be found here.

Readers will recall Unconscious Squirrel!, the unsuccessful cartoon strip about an unconscious squirrel created, and then abandoned, by Lamont Pinochet. One hesitates to say that the character is much-lamented, as nobody took much notice of the strip when it appeared, and Pinochet himself found it tiresome, so much so that he used to fall asleep while drawing it.

Now, in a bold move, the unconscious squirrel has been revived in a new potboiler by Pebblehead. The Nuts Of Narcolepsy is set in a woodland idyll, where an unsuspecting squirrel eats some poisoned or contaminated nuts which cause it to swoon into unconsciousness. As ever, the bestselling paperbackist handles his material in a bravura manner, investing his simple tale with stylistic flourishes and cracking dialogue, displaying an enviable command of the exclamation mark. Early reviews have been positive, with Lex Pilg in the Daily Hubbub Monitor praising it as “a real page-turner of the sort we expect from Pebblehead, with thrills and spills aplenty”, while the angling magazine Minnows In Nets noted with approval its lack of clunk.

Curiously, The Nuts Of Narcolepsy is dedicated to the memory of Eric Fogg (1903-1939), the English composer who fell, or possibly threw himself, under a tube train at Waterloo station on the eve of his second marriage. An open verdict was recorded. There is no evidence that Fogg had a thing about squirrels, and Pebblehead has never expressed any previous interest in him, nor about English music in general. The paperbackist is known to be an enthusiast for noisy aggressive Germans. We shall have to await the deliberations of those dedicated folk who compile the annual Register Of Dedicatees Of Potboilers for enlightenment.

Interviewed on the porch steps of a particularly sordid bordello, Pebblehead dropped hints that we will be seeing more of the unconscious squirrel.

“I find,” he said, “There comes a point when my characters take on a life of their own. It is almost as if I am a reporter, or a biographer, rather than a novelist. You will recall Digby Smew, the fascist podcaster who first appeared in my book The Assassination Of Stephen Fry. Sometimes I fancy he is sitting at breakfast with me, slurping porridge with disgusting table manners. I can’t even remember writing the other forty potboilers of which he is the protagonist. The words come unsummoned. I have an inkling that something similar will happen with the unconscious squirrel. Now that the basic lineaments of his character have been established – that he is a squirrel, that he is unconscious – already he seems freed from the confines of my own pulsating writerly cranium. I swear to God he took on corporeal form this morning. I was eating my breakfast, and across the table there was Digby Smew, and he was staring at something, something behind me, and I turned to look and got a fugitive glimpse of a narcoleptic squirrel snuggled against the wainscot, shimmering in a hallucinogenic haze for a moment before the vision dissolved. But I know he will be back, and I have already felt impelled to dash off twenty thousand words of a second Unconscious Squirrel! potboiler. I don’t want to give too much away, but in this one he plays a leading role in the Hindenburg Disaster.”

When he was able to get a word in edgeways, Pebblehead’s interviewer taxed him with the point that he had not in fact created the unconscious squirrel, but taken him, in all his particulars, from an almost forgotten cartoon strip by the creator of Magnet Boy! The Boy Magnet.

“That is indeed true,” said the paperbackist, having now unfurled his umbrella against an unprecedented downpour, “And I have never tried to conceal the fact. If you knew anything about my work, you would know I have revived and reinvented existing fictional characters before, many a time. I have written, at the last count, twenty-six short stories about Doctor Slop, from The Life And Opinions Of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman by Laurence Sterne, and a trilogy of sci-fi adventures featuring Brave Driver Josef Bong from The Good Soldier Å vejk by Jaroslav HaÅ¡ek. They too, have become very real to me, though for some reason neither of them ever comes to breakfast. Doctor Slop is usually hovering on the landing, and Josef Bong sits in the potting shed on my allotment, whistling.”

The revelation that Pebblehead maintains an allotment will come as a shock to his readers. How in the name of all that is holy, one wonders, does so indefatigable a paperbackist find time to grow radishes and kohlrabi and tomatoes and potatoes and bugloss and beetroot and hollyhocks, not only to grow them but to keep them free of hideous diseases and the predations of tiny parasitic creeping things? Annoyingly, the interviewer did not pursue this fascinating line of inquiry. Dismayed by rainfall, he left Pebblehead standing alone on the steps of the bordello, tucked his notepad into an inner pocket, gave his pencil to a vagrant, and ducked into the shelter of a railway station, descending the escalator to catch a train back to his office. All the more perplexing when one considers that he was working for a magazine entitled Potboilers And Allotments And The Social Glue That Binds Them.

In an echo of the past, the railway station into which the rainsoaked reporter hurried was Waterloo, and he fell, or possibly threw himself, under a train from the very same platform from which Eric Fogg fell, or threw himself, seventy years ago to the day.

“Tolstoy tells the story of an aristocratic woman at the theatre weeping at the imaginary tragedy enacted on the stage. At the same time, outside in the cold, a real tragedy is taking place: her old and faithful coachman, awaiting her in the bitter winter night, is freezing to death.”

Raymond Tallis, “The Freezing Coachman : Some Reflections On Art & Morality”, in Newton’s Sleep (Macmillan, 1995), abridged version in Theorrhoea And After (Macmillan, 1999)

Countless readers, coming upon the words “the freezing coachman”, will think of neither Tolstoy nor Tallis, but of the indefatigable paperbackist Pebblehead. It is well nigh impossible to keep track of the short stories featuring the eponymous frozen hero he taps out on that battered old typewriter of his, pipe packed with scraggy Montenegrin tobacco clamped Simenon-like in his jaws. Unlike Tolstoy’s character, Pebblehead’s freezing coachman remains alive, a ghoulish figure covered in ice, with a reproachful gaze and a booming monotone. In many, but not all stories, he has a Dutch accent.

Pebblehead has been criticised, by the snooty and the hare-brained, for the wild inconsistency of his coachman. In The Freezing Coachman And The Blunkett Cow Attack, for example, he is a sort of mystic cow-whisperer, a gentle and benevolent soul with a heart of gold. Cold gold, but gold nonetheless. In The Freezing Coachman And The Carpets Of Madness, by contrast, he is evil personified, so evil that Beelzebub himself is reduced to a quivering gibbering wreck in his presence. And then of course there is the famous story The Freezing Coachman Goes Rogue, and we all know what happens in that one!

But the variations in his character are as nothing when compared to the bewildering number of guises under which the “coach” of which he has charge appears. It is described, in one Freezing Coachman story or another, as a coach or a carriage or a landau or a landaulette or a britzka or a gig or a trap or a charabanc or a float or a buggy or a hansom or a shandrydan or a post chaise or a brougham or a droshky or a berlin or a wagon or a calash or a jitney or a pony cart or a minibus or a caboose or a caravan or a sleigh or a fiacre or a dray or a jeep or a lorry or a sulky or a cab or a van or a brake or a crate or a taxi or a rattletrap or a sedan chair or a bus or a tin lizzie or a carriole or a curricle or a dustcart or a stanhope or a quadriga or a phaeton or a trolley or a tumbrel or a troika or a saloon or a hearse or a diligence or a bubblecar or a fourgon or a flivver or a clarence or a growler or a conveyance or a roadster or a tilbury or a runabout or a jalopy or a calash or an oxcart or a hackney cab or a tarantass or a black maria or a barouche or a tractor or a tonga or a tank. This may be a case of Pebblehead being slapdash, or playful, or simply not having a clue what he is talking about, given that some of these vehicles can hardly be described as a “coach” by any sensible person.

The moral of Tolstoy’s tale, that an appreciation of great art does not necessarily make one a good person, is obvious. Equally, nearly all of Pebblehead’s stories have a clear moral point to make. We are told that one should never bury a dog while it is still alive, never accept toffee apples from spooky strangers, always rain curses upon a cow that attacks a blind Member of Parliament, or upon a blind Member of Parliament who attacks a cow, depending on which version of the story you believe, never walk widdershins three times around a kirk, never push a boy scout into a crevasse, don’t count your chickens, eat five portions of fruit and vegetables a day according to government guidelines, never put all your eggs in one basket, always check the accuracy of George Orwell’s daily egg count, always uphold the ineffable majesty of the tinpot king of the land of Gaar, never get too close to the edge of the bottomless viper pit of Shoeburyness, and don’t ever, ever wave a towel in the face of an Ampleforth Jesuit. It is true that sometimes we put aside a Freezing Coachman story feeling that Pebblehead has lectured us rather than entertained us, and some of the lessons we are taught are fit only for five-year-olds, but at their best these tales can be both unforgettable and devastating.

I am thinking, for example, of The Freezing Coachman Sorts The Abstract Expressionist Wheat From The Chaff, a thinly-disguised and blistering attack upon the adolescent cod-mystic witterings of Barnett Newman, who tried to imbue his big flat boring daubs with universal and eternal significance. There is an irresistible urge to clap with glee when, in the final paragraph, the Freezing Coachman steps out of his cabriolet and upturns a pot of emulsion over the head of the ludicrous painter “Bennett Nerman”, before beating him with a spade, poking him with a stick, and tying him fast to railway tracks upon which the 4.45 non-stop express to Uttoxeter is due to thunder within the next couple of minutes.

It may well be the finest of all the Freezing Coachman stories, but do not take my word for it. Read every single one of them, the brilliant and the witless, and make up your own mind.

Indefatigable paperbackist Pebblehead has yet another new book out this week. Planet Of The Cloth-Eared Bears is a sci-fi potboiler featuring heroic spaceman Captain Biffo Melvynbragg.

The story begins with the captain’s spaceship forced to crashland on a remote planet, populated entirely by bears who are hard of hearing. Scorched beyond repair, the spaceship’s engines attract the attention of some of the bears, who communicate with each other by a complex system of paw manipulation. Captain Biffo, who has among his accomplishments a diploma in earth-bear behavioural studies, is beflummoxed when he realises he cannot fathom the space-bears’ lingua franca.

Using his space-spade, the captain digs a pit in the spectacularly gruesome soil of the planet’s surface, hoping to trap at least one of the bears in it. But these are wily space-bears, and they wait for the captain to finish digging his pit before dissolving his space-spade using their exciting rayguns. Then they push Biffo himself into the pit.

Forty pages of the paperback are then taken up with the captain’s musings about his predicament, which include passages of blatant plagiarism from writers such as W N P Barbellion, Stefan Zweig, Sylvia Townsend Warner, and Prudence Foxglove. Pebblehead has either forgotten about the rest of the spaceship’s crew or wishes us to believe that Captain Biffo was flying a solo mission. The latter is highly unlikely, given the nature of interplanetary protocols at the time, described carefully and at length in a prolegomenon, the sort of thing Pebblehead can dash off as breezily as the rest of us would write a shopping list, if we still had shops to go to, in this wasteland.

Eventually, the cloth-eared space-bears haul Captain Biffo out of the pit with a winch, and subject him to a personality profile questionnaire. This is given in multiple choice format, which allows Pebblehead to play around, quite foolishly, with the conventions of multiple choice personality profile questionnaires. It transpires that Biffo is a “drugged-up chaffinch” type, the most dangerous personality profile as far as the space-bears are concerned. They put Biffo back in the pit and hold a bear-moot. Pebblehead has great fun with this, probably more so than his readers.

At the end of the moot, half of the planet’s suns explode, for no apparent reason. Biffo exploits the resulting mayhem and confusion to clamber out of the pit and to sprint towards his hobbled spaceship. Just before he gets there, a cloth-eared space-bear zaps him with a different type of exciting raygun. Biffo does not dissolve, but instead is himself transformed into one of the space-bears. Somehow, his hearing is not impaired by this metamorphosis, and he becomes a valued member of the community, even though he never quite masters the paw manipulation technique.

In the final pages, Pebblehead describes with exquisite dullness the slow rusting and disintegration of the spaceship, over many planet-years, until not a trace of it remains. And then, just as we are thinking what a waste of time the whole book has been, Captain Biffo, or rather the space-bear he has become, goes into a kind of spasmodic fit, sheds his space-bear characteristics in a form of ecdysis, knocks together a brand new spaceship out of space-cardboard boxes and space-twigs and space-gum, weirdly transmogrifies the planet’s atmosphere so the space-bears can hear properly, and blasts off into the boundless firmament, heading for his next adventure.

Word has it that Pebblehead has already written three-quarters of the sequel, but he is keeping under his hat whether it will be about Captain Biffo or about the no longer cloth-eared bears. If you want to know more about Pebblehead’s hat, and what else he keeps under it, you will soon be able to register for a newsletter, in paper form, delivered to your door by the postie once in a blue moon, or when the cows come home.

I ought to have explained that the piece entitled The Cruel Sea was simply a list of titles of the books currently being written by bestselling paperbackist Pebblehead. He always has a number of works on the go at any one time, expertly juggling everything in that big baked potato-like head of his. Hooting Yard reader Dr Ruth Pastry tells me that she is drawing a diagram of Pebblehead’s head, or more precisely of the innards of his head, which she wants me to post here when it is finished. That means we will all have a better, and long overdue, insight into the great paperbackist’s fantastic brain, in diagrammatic form, with arrows.

NOTE : Dr Pastry says her diagram will be without arrows.