Bookbinding

It took Amazon quite a while to sort me out with physical copies of my book, but now I can appreciate its girth and heft from the comfort of my own home. I can even view it upside down, which I couldn’t easily do on my phone.

Here is a raspberry-hued extract:

“This was the late Dr. Gagnon’s study,” I said, nodding to the electric fan which now stood idle and unplugged. “He was scattered all about. It took Muckle hours to gather the remains by brush and shovel, and I fear he is even now resting in pieces intermingled with ordinary house dust and insect casings.”

“I don’t see how you could identify the body with certainty under such circumstances,” said Scotland Yard, baffled.

(I supply his side of the conversation with some dubiety, since nothing he says seems to stay in the mind for more than an instant after utterance. But I can mostly recall what I said, so with a bit of deduction his contributions to the symposium can be loosely reconstructed.)

“Well, we used a couple of methods. Firstly, Dr. Gagnon had been subsisting for some weeks on a diet of turnip. Pierre moistened a finger, sampled the dusty remnants, and confirmed that they retained a marked flavour of that particular root vegetable.”

“But for heaven’s sake, man, leaving aside the possible charge of cannibalism, someone could simply have cremated a cartload of produce.”

“They could,” I agreed, “But ‘neeps,’ as the locals call them, do not traditionally wear dentures. But we did not settle so easily on a fixed conclusion. Dr. Stagmantle sifted through the powdery material, subjecting it to various tests, and detected a high level of Gamma Radiation. The late Dr. Gagnon had spent several years studying such rays at the Wolfeschlegelsteinhausenbergerdorff Institute in Basel. So we are confident that poor Gwynplaine no longer inhabits Urchless, save in granular form.”

And here are a couple of cerulean links:

Link to Amazon UK.

Link to Amazon US.