“He has never been known to use a word that might send a reader to the dictionary.” – William Faulkner (about Ernest Hemingway).

Now I don’t know about you but I imagine old Bill was trying to be insulting when he said that. But if I was old Ernie I’d have a bit of a chuckle over it. (Before I smacked old Bill one on the nose). Because there’s something really annoying in my book about authors showing off. I’m almost twenty seven and I figure if I don’t know it yet, it couldn’t have been much of a word in the first place. I don’t want to sit reading with a dictionary on my lap just in case I don’t know some vocabulary in my own language. I feel inadequate enough already without a novelist rubbing my nose in it. I was a PE teacher, for heaven’s sake. The only two words we needed with over two syllables were givusanotherone barkeeper.

The problem with writing a blob like this is that there’ll be people out there who know all the words in the English language and they’ll call over their wives and say, “Transmoria, darling. Come and look at this. That Cotterill chap doesn’t know the word, propitiate and he calls himself a writer.” Well, I tell you, if propitiate was such an all-fired special goddamned word, why don’t they put it on cereal packets?

‘Kellogs new zingy fruit loops will propitiate you out of your socks.’

I tell you why not. Because we already have the word tickle which is much easier to say and less likely to be confused with the word prophylactic, a finagling congeneracy that constantly trips up academics.

Sometimes I find myself stalled in the middle of a Kathy Reichs thinking, “I haven’t understood one word in the last six pages.” But I do make allowance for writers who just want to bamboozle me with technical vocab they know I won’t waste my life looking up. I think we all secretly want to believe that there’s an advanced technical world out there we’ll never be allowed into. No, it’s the authors who drop in words they find in crossword puzzles that get me. Most of these smartarse words are just stuck up, highfalutin versions of perfectly good words we all know and love. They’re shoved in there to keep us readers in our place.

I’ve just stopped reading a book by P.D. James. I confess I didn’t get very far. In the first chapter she’d already hit me with mullioned windows and palimpsest. She obviously didn’t want me to read any further. When I was growing up the only windows we had were cracked and stuck. Not once did I hear my dad say, ‘One more word out of you and I’ll kick you out that bleeding mullioned window, boy.’ It annoyed me that I had to look it up. Surely the lady could have merely disembroiled the discomfiture by saying, ‘Cecilia walked to the window which had a vertical member such as of stone or wood, dividing it.’ In such a way the noesis would have been autodidactic.

But palimpsest was just plain orotundity.

“Oh, my word, Transmoria. Now the fool’s going to say he doesn’t know what palimpsest is. What is the world coming to?”

Not only did I not know what it meant. I also refused to look it up. So you’ll have to. It’s an extremely silly sounding word which I’m sure has a perfectly haymish synecdoche. Now, something in me wants to forgive P.D. James because according to Wickedpedia she’s 160 years old and a lot of these words were probably arpifuse when she was a girl. But I have toz warn you there are a lot of carpacuous writers out there who vorantly look up words in the dictionary just to show how sepential they are. And I for one am not going to gyre their slithy toves.

“No, Transmoria. I can’t find it either. It can’t be a real word.”

1978. It was a hot summer day in LaGuardia. I was in a small windowless room with a boy in uniform and there was no A/C. In fact there was no A. If it was any consolation, it was worse for him than for me. All I did was sweat. His face turned to road kill as the heat brought out his acne. I didn’t want to get too close cause I knew some of those little rasberries were going to blow. We’d been there for an hour. He’d taken everything out of my pack, even the dirty, yucky underwear and socks. Deep down at the bottom he’d found my diary, and there he’d sat reading my most intimate secrets. It gave me time to ponder. Why hadn’t I taken a flight into JFK? They probably had A/C in their interrogation rooms at JFK. They’d probably just assume this long-haired, bearded hippy type was a musician or a poet on his way to a concert and wave me through. They probably wouldn’t have singled me out and gone through my documents and found my resumé and my references.

“If you’re supposed to be coming here on holiday, son (He called me son even though I knew he was far too young and unpleasant looking to have got anywhere near my mother) How come you’re bringing your job references?”

It was a good question. I was hoping they might help me find work but, of course I couldn’t tell him that. I was on a tourist visa.

“I picked them up in England when I was back there,” I said. “I thought I might need them when I get back to Australia. I didn’t dare post them.”

He gave me the eyeball. I think they must teach immigration officials the eyeball. They’ve all got it. Every country. That same, superior, ‘I know your deepest thoughts’ eyeball. I knew he wasn’t a very smart immigration official cause if he was he would have started on the last page of my diary where he could have found my hopes and dreams of a new life in America. Instead he started at page one and went through it one sleazy secret at a time looking up at me now and then and drooling.

I was just about to tell him to put me on the first flight out of the country, to anywhere, but he slammed the book shut having only reached April, and he smiled.

“I tell you what I’m gonna do,” he said. I assumed gonna was some kind of a word. “I’m gonna let you in. You know why?” I was on tenterhooks. “Cause I like ya.” Oh, how lucky I was. I had a friend. I’d lost my appetite for a life in north America but I had a new buddy at the airport. He even gave me his phone number. I often wonder what it was he read in my diary that endeared me to him so.

I think that was the traumatic moment that first made me hate immigration officials. I grew sick of those friendless upstarts in uniform flourishing their power like a Lightsaber – Jedi Overlord of their own little four feet of nether-world.

So imagine how delightful it must be for someone with my hang-up to be living in a country where every three months I have to report to the Thai immigration department. And, as if that wasn’t bad enough, they’re all police. Don’t get me started on police. (I don’t have a problem with postmen so I know it’s not a uniform thing. I still have traumatic moments with immigration officials on casual Fridays when they wear their ridiculous Hawaiian shirts.) The web boards are jammed with horror stories of foreigners having run-ins with the Immies over here; corruption, racism, inefficiency, corruption, insults, humiliation, and, I’m told…corruption. I believe all these stories because I’ve witnessed them myself. It’s amazing how many loops you can be sent through unless you grease a palm here or there. Even a box of chocolates or a bottle of wine can make the process that much easier.

“You’re police,” I say. “Aren’t you ashamed of yourselves? You’re supposed to be the moral and legal bastions of the country, examples for the next generation, yet you allow yourselves to be so openly rotten? Well, I tell you what,” I say. “Paying graft is just as bad as expecting it in my book. So you keep your visa and I’ll get on the next flight to Malaysia. See if I care.”

Of course, when I say “I say these things” I don’t mean the words actually come out of my mouth. What I mean is that I think them very loudly, because I don’t want to go to Malaysia. I like it here. And that’s the power the immigration weasels wield. And, as if things weren’t bad enough, they’ve just found a new ruse.

During the week I arrived at my big visa day – the extension. They’ve shuffled round their administration districts and moved me from one provincial immigration office to another. Four hours round trip drive across country. A new, unknown foe. But I was ready for them. I’d copied everything three times including the outside covers of my passport. I had my health certificate, my bank statement, my passport photographs and my form, neatly filled out. I had the visa fee in exactly the correct amount in a transparent envelope. I had a hand held tape recorder with a blank tape and the police ministry complaints hotline on speed dial on my wife’s cell phone. I knew I could combat whatever degradation they threw at me. But the bastards were one up on me again. They hit me with something I’d never expected. They were polite, efficient and respectful. In a little over half an hour I walked out of there with my new visa. Damn them. They always find a way to get to me.

Following the huge success of my recent, ‘Have I told you about my medical problems?’ blob, I’ve decided to go for another one of those topics that old people like me force you to listen to in post office queues. Today I’m going to discuss ‘gardening’. Whoa, hold on there! Before you run screaming from the room, I’m not talking about that, ‘It’s been a busy day, Marj. Before my breath gave out I planted three of those pansies over by the ornamental Chinese good luck bridge’. And I’m certainly not talking about the, (…to Joey the budgie) ‘Look darling, mummy’s sprained her little finger pruning the primroses.’ No, sir. Them lot are all wimps. Ten minutes hard labour with a fork and they’re bushed. I could arm wrestle the average gardener with both hands tied behind my back.

No, I’m talking about… Extreme Gardening.

For those of you unfamiliar with the term, Extreme Gardening, let me explain. It’s a little like regular gardening but it takes place in a totally unsuitable location. A bit like a silver service crystal-glass dinner on a bamboo raft on the high sea. My first exposure to EG was in Chiang Mai some twenty years ago. Before that, I’d never been anywhere long enough to put down roots. (That was the first of a succession of very annoying gardening puns you’re going to have to put up with in this blob. Sorry.) I found myself renting a large cheap house on the Ping River. I have no idea why but I got it into my head to dig up all the concrete in the back yard and turn it into a riverside oasis. I bought a lot of gardening equipment and spent every weekend in my garden wearing nothing but boots, lilac Speedos and zinc nose cream. Once I’d dug up the concrete I had little choice but to turn it into a rockery. It was about eight feet tall but had numerous crooks and nannies into which I could insert shrubs and ornaments. The rockery became a feature of the house. Barely a weekend went by when I wasn’t approached by this or that Sherpa asking if I’d open it for rock-climbing groups.

Then, one morning, I wiped the sleepy dust from my eyes, splashed to the window to look at my rockery, and it was gone. Gone? A great pile of concrete? Gone? In fact, the whole garden was in absentia. In fact, that knee high water I’d waded through to get to the kitchen wasn’t just some evil hangover joke. The little Ping River had grown up overnight and taken my garden – because it could.

It took me a while to get over that. But, I guess I just couldn’t leaf well alone. Three years ago, Jess and I moved to a lump of land on the Gulf of Siam to a place called Lang Suan which ironically translates as; Behind the Garden (acacia were wondering). Every night, lulled to sleep by the gently hushing surf on the beach. Tall coconut trees swaying in the breeze like slow-motion one-legged hula dancers. And, despite the neighbours’ mocking laughter, I set about turning our cow paddock into a tropical paradise. Heard this before? Well, Chiang Mai was Eden compared to Lang Suan.

The Thai Tourism Authority would have you believe there are two seasons in Thailand; the cooling gently sprinkling rainy season and the warm but not unpleasant hot season. These are the same people currently attempting to tell the world that Bangkok’s a great shopping venue. In fact, there are four seasons here on the Gulf. We have the ‘bake everything to its charred remains season’, the ‘flood everything season’, the ‘Greatest Hits of the other three seasons, season’, and, my personal favourite; ‘the Monsoon season’. The latter lashes us from October through to January with such ferocity that our house is five meters further from the ocean than when we built it. Coconuts pelt you at 100 mph. It’s not unusual to see the odd neighbour flying through the air at the end of a rope tied to a cow. This is followed by a sudden lull from February to April during which the temperatures reach 86 degrees centigrade and I’m out there with my ice pack giving artificial respiration to the frangipanis. All the plants gather around the house for shade. We let the more delicate ones sleep inside. That’s when you find out who your ferns are. Then come the rains in May. ‘Looks like it might rain, Jess’, you say, mainly because you’ve just spent three hours watering. Then you look up and smile as the first droplets sizzle onto the hot earth. Then you sit under the balcony roof with a cold beer and the dogs and you watch. And you watch. And three months later it stops. August and September could be any one of the three other seasons or a combination of the lot. It’s not unknown to be blown over, sunburnt and washed away all on the same day. But somewhere in there is a cold season when it gets so chilly you have to wear shorts that reach your knees.

I have lost two entire gardens since we arrived here. One sat under water holding its breath for a week until it realized the water level wasn’t going down. For a while I was pruning in scuba gear. A lot of cutting remarks during that rainy season, I can till you. The other garden left me this January. It was taken by the ocean which breached our humble defences one day and carried everything that wasn’t nailed down way beyond our house to a new home in the bogs out back. It left so much salt behind we looked like a Vermont ski lodge. But I am an Extreme Gardener and our motto is, Leave No Bougainvillea Behind. I’m not taking no sh*t from no Mother… Nature. I’ve filled the land. I’ve built a wall. I have machine gun turrets. I’ve made little cocktail umbrellas to get the team through the hot season. I’ve planted stuff with roots so deep my mate Gary in Sydney swears they keep him awake at night. I came back from wrotting my book and I was straight out there, dedicating my life to getting my boys through this next campaign. I’ve got blisters in places a man didn’t even warrant having places. I am burnt ragged and riddled with canker and suffering from verticillium wilt. So don’t you give me that…‘Oooh, look Bert, he’s gardening. What a pansy.’ I suppose I could sycamore convivial spot but this is vine with me. If you want to see what a real man does in his garden, take a look at http://picasaweb.google.com/colincot. It’s okay. I took the dirty stuff off.

No, wreally! Those of you unfamiliar with the word, ‘wrotten’ shouldn’t feel too badly because I made it up. (I shall be covering made-up words in a blob futuredatedly). Wrotten, as you’ve probably guessed, is a cross between written and rotten. And, like many accommodating particles it allows itself to be used as an adjective. But, haven’t we all at some time or another?

I have recently returned from a horrible place where I locked my door and windows against the awful Thai New Year water abuse festival. I filled my refrigerator with microwave dinners (Only to discover the place didn’t have a microwave. Warning! Those little plastic trays do not, I repeat do not retain their shape in a gas oven.) I had the owner remove the television and I ran in intravenous drip from a five-liter box of South African red. And there I sat, wrotting away for three weeks only to emerge onto the damp, talcum powder-stained streets with my hand-wrotten book under my arm in four Tesco notebooks. The book is, I don’t hesitate to say, truly awful. But I love it anyway.

It reminds me of a day in 1961 when I was walking home from school and I bumped into Hilary Swank. No. Not that Hilary Swank. That Hilary Swank wasn’t even born yet. This Hilary Swank was 16 and I was surprised to see her pushing a pram along the pavement. Hilary had vanished from our street a year earlier and nobody seemed to know where she’d gone. She was a sixteen-year-old girl so I expected her pram to contain a pretty porcelain dolly with chubby cheeks. But, no. Snarling and burping in that old perambulator was the ugliest baby I’d ever seen in my short life. It had all the charm of a squid.

‘Hello, Colin,’ she said. ‘Look what I did?’

There. She admitted it. I was wondering whether I should call George the local bobby because that child had obviously been abused. But Hilary yanked the little crustacean out of its mobile crypt and held it to her miraculously expanded bosoms. And it was quite obvious that she loved that child despite its deformities.

‘Well, done, Hil,’ I said, not yet realizing how a child came into being. I was nine, and gooseberry bushes still featured in my concept of human reproduction. I even thought she might have picked it up cheap at a seconds store in London.

Both the child and Hilary grew up and we later learned that George the bobby had been more than a little complicit in the manufacture of the ugly baby. The moustache should have been a dead giveaway. He was sacked and he and Hilary and Nosferatu Jr. moved to a nearby suburb. I saw them from time to time on Wimbledon Broadway. Hilary went to great lengths to disguise her child who, to my surprise, turned out to be a female. Hilary dressed her daughter in pink ribbons in the summer and pink bobble hats in the winter and I imagine she spent a good deal of money on facial reconstruction because, year by year, the child started to resemble a normal human being. In fact, by the time she was sixteen all that plastic surgery had turned her into a real looker.

I met her in a pub when I was home from my last year at college. To the amazement of my old football teammates, she swaggered over to our table, smiled, wiggled a little bit, and said, ‘Hello, Colin. Do you remember me?’

THE END

No, wait. There was a point to this. What was it again? Oh, right. The book I’ve wrotten. You see, my book is really ugly. It’s stupid and badly wrotten and is fully of mistakes and embarrassing bits and characters get killed then come back to life again, and I keep giving everyone the wrong names, etcetera, etcetera. There’s nothing good about it at all. If anyone could decipher my horrible handwrotting, they’d be dismayed by my rapid decline, my fall from crime-writing superstar to doggy doodoo. They might even call into question my IQ and ethnic background.

But, you see? All my books look like that when I bring them home. They’re all wrotten. I know with a pink ribbon here, a good deal of facial reconstruction, an Oprah makeover and a workout, that my book will stroll up to me one evening and say, ‘Hello Colin. Remember me?’ And she’ll be a beauty. And my mates will dig me in the ribs and go, ‘Whoooa!’

Hopefully it won’t get pregnant when it’s sixteen.

It’s been three weeks already and I’m starting to miss you both. Here’s the final posting of my old cartoons. This week is my slant on how there were more authors at the 2006 Bouchercon than their were readers, an illustration for Jim Eckhardt’s book of short stories; Thai Jinks, and the love affair with the new pandas at Chiang Mai zoo. If I haven’t starved to death I’ll be back in person next week with lots of funny stories about how I’ve been locked up in a room with a pen and a dozen notebooks.

Still away. This week I’ve decided to go colour. These were my slants on the Thai government’s attempts to put gory photos on cigarette packets to dissuade smoking, on the national panic over genetically altered fruit, on why foreigners weren’t being shaken down by the coastguard, and on the meat menu at the new Safari Park in Chiang Mai.

When you get to read this semiblob I’ll be away at a secret location writing my next Dr. Siri book. So, in order to keep you both from wandering away from our weekly delights I’ve decided to send you a few old cartoons. As you’ve probably worked out from reading my books, I’m more of a cartoonist than a writer. Every day I turn on the computer hoping to find an offer from The New Yorker asking me to be their in-house picture guy. I’ve had my moments. Not that many years back I had a weekly strip in the Nation newspaper called Mann Farang. It dealt with local issues like the disappearance of Jim Thomson and why crocodiles allow themselves to be manhandled by idiot keepers. The weekly turned to a monthly and then to a ‘Don’t call us…’. Then there were social issue cartoons for magazines like how the new landscaping affected Chiang Mai, but never that big one to lure me away from writing. I’d gladly drop my pen in a second if I had a real cartoon job.

With all the talk about politics and history and bio-chemistry in my colleagues’ blobs these last few weeks I’m starting to feel like a bit of a light-weight. Not only am I second-to-last slack-head (ahead of only Guest Blobber) in the Blobbing Premier League tables you see to your right, I’m also perhaps the only person on the planet who hasn’t passed on my opinion of the democratic principles of governance in Southeast Asia. It wouldn’t surprise me if some of you out there might have the opinion that I’m a bit dim and lacking in insight on matters of major concern to the world. So, it’s time to address these misconceptions and put in my sixpenny worth on the topic of hemorrhoids. I apologize if you’re engaging in a meal right now and to make hemorrhoids easier to swallow, I’m including them together with a number of other ailments that concern old people like myself. Apart from probing the above, I shall also be bending over backwards in my expose of lumbar pain, following through on kidney stones, and straightening out a few knee misconceptions.

I shall take these topics in reverse order. When I was little, I recall my granny telling me that granddad’s knees had ‘gone again’. Me, being a curious six-year-old, would head off in search of them, being careful not accidentally crush them underfoot in my endeavors. Little did I know then that granddad’s knees would eventually catch up with me. I recently watched an excruciating movie called Bad Lieutenant. I cringed the whole way through it, not only because Nicholas Cage is such an awful actor, but because the character he almost played was suffering from chronic back pain. I could feel it every time he jumped onto Eva Mendez. ‘Don’t do it,” I’d shout, to no avail. Luckily for him he had access to heroin and cocaine. All I had was Aspirin. Suffering from kidney stones, as I have, becomes much worse when you hear a comedian on TV describe it as a blowfish passing down a rubber hose. And, yes, I’ve had hemorrhoids, buckets of ‘em. And I’m not ashamed to admit it.

But here’s the rub. All those old-person complaints hit me before I reached thirty. At the age of eighteen when all the other boys were out getting their first nooky-noodles, I got my first hemorrhoid. I worked out a lot so for the first few months I thought it was a new muscle. My coach had instilled the ‘no pain – no gain’ philosophy in the team so I know I gained a lot that year. My initiation in the world of kidney stones was at the tender age of twenty-five and they remained faithful compadres through to the age of fifty. But then I discovered a wonderful weed called ‘Cat’s Whiskers grass’ and I haven’t weed a blowfish since. (No, I do not own the CWG rights nor have the owners paid me a handsome fee for promoting their product. It really is magic.). I didn’t get my first dodgy knee till I was 29. It had something to do with me training for marathons I never had any hope of winning. Nobody remembers the runner up in a race. The doctor told me my left knee was degenerating. I took this to mean it was ageing rapidly and I wondered what I’d ever done to my left knee to make it get old before the rest of me. At thirty my back went out for the first time. (presumably in search of granddad’s knees). So you see, I was an old guy even before I’d had a chance to sample middle-age.

I realize I still have a lot to look forward to; not the least of these is when my bowels decide they’re taking over the decision making on when to evac. But I’ve weathered greater deluges. I’ve had hepatitis, dengue fever, Japanese encephalitis, bronchitis, tuberculosis, appendicitis and myxomatosis. But they all passed. I’m through the worst of it. I have survived. For the last five years I haven’t had anything more serious than a cold. Last weekend I kayaked forty kilometers down the Lang Suan river. Yes it almost killed me but we’ll show those body parts who’s in charge here. Our local fortune teller told me that if I didn’t die unnaturally in my fifties (I have two years to go), I’d die a natural death in my nineties. I think she’s misunderestimating me. The newspaper today said that with recent advances in medicine and technology, the first person on the planet to reach one thousand might have already been born. I think it was talking about me.

You probably think I’d be sick of that question after the sixtieth time of hearing it but I’m not. I look forward to it. I love it. it’s my favourite question. Even more favourite than, “Do you have any special clothes you wear when you’re writing?” and, “What’s the very first word you ever wrote?” (Mauve flannelette jimjams and  ‘mummi’ respectively in case you were curious). The reason I like it so much is that I can try out more and more outrageous answers every time.

I once told a gentleman in the audience that I go to second-hand bookshops and buy a dozen novels nobody’s ever heard of, take them home and steal all the good ideas. I thought he’d be disappointed but he merely took notes, nodded his head knowingly and smiled. If I remember rightly his name was Dave Brown, or Don or Dan. Something like that.

I’ve tried the, “I get disgracefully drunk and when I  wake up in the morning I find scribbled notes all over the house chock full of ideas. (In fact this version was a little too close to the truth so I only used it once.) But that answer naturally morphed into the channeling of Agatha Christi. I sit in a darkened room, a pen poised above a notepad and I go “Ohm” for an hour. Agatha steers my hand across the pages.

I have shorter responses for those events where they only give me three minutes of Q&A:

“I find them on the refrigerator door.”

“I get them from my dog who used to be Ernest Hemmingway.”

“I have them delivered.”

“I eat a lot of pickled onions.”

“Actually it’s just the one idea written in different sitting positions.”

I never fail to amuse myself with my answers to the WDYGYIF? question. And the good news is that people who ask it have no concept of sarcasm. “I asked him, Mother, and he said he gets them from his dog. Who’d have thought it?” The only answer I haven’t yet given is the true one. And, viewers, it’s your lucky night because here, in a rare moment of exclusivity, for your eyes only in this blob, I am going to divulge my source. As with all good sources it comes with a little spice and takes some shaking to get it out of the bottle. But here goes.

A few years ago I started to lose my mind. No, don’t laugh. It’s not funny. Hot on the tail of my mind went my memory. Finding myself with neither a mind nor a memory complicated every day chores like kissing whoever that was beside me in the bed every morning claiming to be my wife. Like confusing hair gel and toothpaste even though they contain subtle clues in their titles. Like writing to tell my fans how pleased I am that they enjoy my Harry Potter series.

But every cloud has a silver lining and little crystal chandeliers. As my memory shriveled to a juiceless grape my imagination became a huge pregnant watermelon of the bizarre. There are a number of precedents on record of people losing one sense (as opposed to me who lost all of them) and being compensated by mother nature in another area. Stevie Wonder lost his sight as a baby but his left leg grew four inches longer than his right. Concert pianist Merslov Digitzeroski lost both his hands in a lawn mower accident but learned to play the harp with his nose. Michael Jackson has been dead for several months but he just signed a 270 million dollar contract with Sony to keep producing albums. And I lost my mind and was compensated with an almost unfingerable dyke of ideas. They come at me all the time from all directions. My brain fluid is LSD. I dream of a time when my imagination will just give me a few seconds rest. The woman claiming to be my wife is sick of it. “What time is it, Colin?”

“Here or on the planet Bongk where there are only five minutes in a day?”

“Forget it.”

There. You heard it here first, folks.

I suppose it’s just as well that Mr. Gillette started to put his blades in those little plastic cartridges because once they’ve read this week’s blob, more than a few publishers will be reaching for razors. You see, I have a confession to make. When I intimated that I liked the covers you put on my books, I lied. I’m sorry. I often go out of my way to not hurt other people’s feelings to the point that I make myself a miserable wretch. I know I didn’t exactly say the words, “I like it,” but I may have been too free with expressions like, “It has a certain unrestricted simplicity”, or “It’s rather interesting”, or, “It’s orange”.

I need to begin this confessional by pointing out that, unless you’re somebody with literary weight (my own weight being merely flab) your publisher won’t send you a cover and say, “Tell us what you think and we’ll make all the changes you recommend.” Heaven forbid that they should ask you to design the thing in the first place. They actually have first and final say on the cover. They have a little trick. They tell you that everyone at the publishing house (including the tea lady and the man who cleans the drains) and the marketing department and ‘the industry’ all love it. Then they’ll say, “What do you think?” Of course you aren’t going to tell the truth after such a build up. You aren’t going to alienate an editor who has probably put several minutes into the selection of stock photographs and gone down the Dulux paint chart to find a colour for the title that matched. She’s the expert. (Notice I didn’t put that in inverted commas cause editors pick up on little details like that.) With one or two very rare exceptions, I have hated the covers they put on my books. They’re either twiddley, arty, flowery McCall Smith look-alikes that make those not-in-the-know believe Colin Cotterill is the nom de plume of an ageing lady horse rider with pink hair from Sussex, or they stick on Asian postcard pictures, irrespective of what country they’re taken in. Of course the photographers and artists have produced beautiful work but I don’t want their pictures stuck on the front of my books any more than they’d want my prose plastered across their living room walls. They aren’t how I see my books.

“So”, you ask, “how do you see your books, Colin?” Good question. The two words that come to mind are, ‘dark’ and ‘funny’. My novels describe gruesome murders and tortures; gore with a whimsical twist. I don’t want to be responsible for giving some chronic heart patient that final push when he picks up a book with bicycles and flowers on the cover and comes across a man’s head being split open against a tree. No, I’d go the black humour route. You remember the photos in the movie: The Others, with Nicole Kidman? The photos of the dead, dressed up and posed? In the Victorian era they used to go to all kinds of extremes like having their dead sister in her best party dress propped up on an unseen wooden stand in the family group pic. Professional morgue workers used to come along and draw on smiles and paint open eyes on the departed’s eyelids. I think that is extremely cool. So my covers would feature an obviously dead – preferably beginning to rot – body, shot from above, perhaps in a grass-lined grave or a coffin completely filling the cover. There would be some comedic element to the photo like the corpse playing a guitar in death with a pick between his teeth, or listening to a walkman and wearing a Grateful Dead T-shirt.

Which brings me to my next point. The kinds of books I’d buy because of the cover are probably not those selected by the vast majority of readers. This, I grant you, might have an influence on the marketing department. The only covers I’ve been moderately attracted to were those produced by Random House Canada. They looked like real books, not cut and paste primary school art projects. They were quirky and colourful and had my name in big type just like the ones you see in the shops – and four books into the series they dumped my arse because nobody was buying them. Unceremoniously hacked. Could I be wrong about covers? I self-published a book of short stories recently with a ‘different’ cover I’d put together myself. I loved it. iUniverse sold four copies. Despite that, it was picked up by a real publisher and the first thing they told me to do was change the cover. They let me paint it myself but to their specifications and I still don’t like it so it’ll probably do very well.

But my taste bodes ominously for the cover you see to the right of this blob. It’s book seven, LOVE SONGS FROM A SHALLOW GRAVE, the final book in the Soho version of the Dr. Siri series (Although they have the option to buy the continuing series from the UK) and it’s as close as they’ve come to my taste. A stark, black mysterious cover that leaves the buyer asking, “What stark, black mystery lies within the pages of this book?” I’m tempted to think they’re trying to scuttle me. “We’ll teach him for fleeing to England” they think. We’ll do him a stark mysterious cover and show him just how many Goths waste their Edward and the Squashing Little Fluffy Animals CD money on cozy crime novels. So, I guess it’s time to start going through the sits-vacant ads. I’ll see you all on the street sometime. Or, alternatively, you could all prove me wrong and arrest my decline by rushing out and buying the book.