The Blurb, Lee Child

As you all know, Dead Money is due to hit on the first of next month, and as part of my ongoing campaign to widen my readership, I've been sending the book around, hoping to get blurbs from some Big Names. Most of them haven't bothered their arses coming back to me - I'm looking at you, Philip Roth - and someone else just left a bag of flaming dog shit on my doorstep (narrows eyes at Lessing). Ruth Rendell threatened to rip out my intestines and feed them, mother bird style, to PD James, which I suppose was a "no". Alexander McCall Smith told me to, and I quote, "stop wearing my underpants and get the fuck out of my house else I'll bray you retarded", which I thought was a little emotional, but unfortunately symptomatic of the kind of replies I'd been getting.

And then, just this morning, I received a blurb from Lee Child. He demanded to be quoted in full and, as I'm not sure the guys at Blasted Heath will actually be able to use the whole thing, I've copied it here to avoid Child's not-inconsiderable wrath:

Gmail is the free, yet advertising-supported, email service provided by Google, known by developers for its pioneering use of AJAX, and released as a beta on April the first, two thousand and four, which one of my many assistants was a part of. As of October two thousand and eleven, Gmail boasted two hundred and sixty million users, and I was one of them. I use it as a secure webmail to interact with the public, because it allows twenty-five megabytes per message and has seven gigabytes of free online storage. When you have as much to say as I do, you need the extra memory to say it, because if a sentence is worth writing, it's worth putting at least a couple of commas in it. 

On Sunday, the twenty-third of October two thousand and eleven at precisely three-forty ante meridiem, my Gmail account alerted me through a series of monitored and highly secure connections to a new message, an email with an attachment, and that attachment was a Word document, a docx to be precise, which meant that whoever had sent me the email had kept their Microsoft products reasonably up-to-date. Thanks to my partnership with a security company formerly attached to the Pentagon, I was sure that this particular attachment was virus-free, but when I read the name of the document – DEADMONEY.DOCX – I was given reason to pause. 

What is this Dead Money? I thought. It sounds like a spam email, and spam emails are dangerous because they may contain such things as viruses and rude language like "shit-snacks", "wank-jockey" or "cummerbund".

I wasn't afraid, I was never afraid, fear wasn't part of my genetic make-up, being the six-ten multi-millionaire chick-magnet that I was. I'd worked for Granada, after all, which was the hardest of all the ITV regional studios, and was responsible for over forty thousand hours of television, including Brideshead Revisited, The Jewel in the Crown, Prime Suspect and Cracker, all of which I actually wrote in my cigarette breaks, and so I was used to eating fear with a side of eggs, pancakes and bacon for breakfast - Reacher's favorite, but then you already knew that. That was if I ate at all, which I didn't, preferring instead a cup of coffee, which I liked the way I liked my men – hot, black, bitter and burn a hole in your gut as soon as look at you – and in a mug with a three-inch diameter and a good, sturdy handle. Even so, I reviewed the email carefully, searching for signs of delinquency or unmanliness, both of which I subsequently found in abundance: 

Holla Jimbo, 

Please find attached a copy of my most recent novel Dead Money. I think you'll like it, because I know you proper fucking hate anything "good", and I think you'll agree that the attached has absolutely no literary merit whatsoever. I hope you end up blurbing it, if only to let people know that you read something outside of thrillers and your own stock options. Peace out, my bredren.

Yours relatively sincerely, 

The Reverend Ray Banks Esq. 

I reviewed the email and my eyes kept straying back to the attachment. Was this a virus sent by one of those few, clearly mentally unstable people who didn't find my books both erotic and educational? I had, after all, detected a note of sarcasm in this Ray Banks' words (if indeed that was his real name). Yet I showed no outward signs of concern, my jaw set and my eyes steely, grey and mesmerising. 

I checked the exits of my Manhattan penthouse pad. Two doors. A cupboard. A manservant named Skidmark McFlouncypants (a contractual obligation), who I sent downstairs to fetch more coffee, cigarettes and softcore pornography. Next to me, three feet measured diagonally at thirty-one degrees from my left knee, was the bust of Shakespeare that, when broken, revealed a large scarlet button that, when pressed, would set in motion the thousand-and-fifteen cogs and gears that would, in turn, move a bookcase full of precious Patterson first editions, signed in blood (or whatever foul-smelling liquid performed the function of blood) by Patterson himself, and reveal a fireman’s pole which led down to a secret subterranean den, which was where I kept my extensive arsenal of Hanzo steel and large-calibre automatic weaponry and my Grantmobile – an armor-plated Bugatti Veyron, capable of reaching sixty miles per hour in two point five seconds and reaching a top speed of two hundred and fifty three miles per hour thanks to an eight point zero W16-Cylinder, four turbochargers and a dual-clutch DSG computer-controlled manual transmission. It also had twin machine guns, smokescreen and a bumper sticker that read "ASK ME ABOUT LOOM*". 

Sometimes if you want to know for sure if the ice cream is tasty, you need to give it a lick, I thought.

I opened the file with a double-click of the index finger of my right hand, and Microsoft Word Two Thousand and Ten, otherwise known as Word Fourteen, Microsoft’s most up-to-date word processing application for specific use with its latest operating system, Windows Seven, sprang into life, the familiar logo appearing briefly (approximately six seconds) on my Luvaglio laptop screen, which was seventeen inches and exclusively designed with anti-reflective glare coating for crystal-clear and brighter image perspective, and which was also loaded with an integrated screen cleaning device, as well as a very rare and peculiar-coloured diamond that acted as both power button and identification device. It was worth a million dollars, and after a dozen more key-presses, it would be too used for me to continue with it.

The document opened with no apparent immediate danger and I would have breathed a sigh of relief had I not already trained my body to reject respiration as a weakness. Despite this, I lit three cigarettes and ate them as I read the offered book. It took me seven thousand one hundred and forty-three seconds.

It was a passable book, too short and not particularly special, with too much swearing and characters that were weak-minded and prone to sloppy violence, and featured a plot that refused to conform to strict generic conventions, contained no car chases or page-long scenes of its protagonist stomping cardboard thugs to a slightly twitching paste, and it appeared to be set in a realistic, drab location with no exotic allure whatsoever. I wouldn’t recommend it to any of my readers, and I wouldn’t suggest that anyone pay good money to buy it. And that's as nice as I can make it.

You hear that? “It was … short and … special. I would … recommend it to any of my readers, and I would … suggest that anyone pay good money to buy it.”

Thanks, Mr Child!

*Registered Trademark