Le Saux was widely considered homosexual during his career. (Note that I don’t say “believed” – of that more later.) As a result he was treated terribly by crowds and even by his fellow professionals, an indubitable and well-documented fact further documented by Le Saux in the entirety of his second chapter and hefty chunks of all subsequent chapters. His team-mates at Chelsea didn’t like him, he explains repeatedly, because he read The Guardian and liked cafes. He didn’t fit in with their idea of a proper footballer, so they bullied him and teased him and spread rumours about his sexuality. Soon everybody inside and outside of football knew that he was supposedly gay. And nobody did a thing about it.

Because (as Le Saux normally seems suddenly to remember and tack on) there’s nothing wrong with being gay, it’s just that he’s not and wasn’t. Still, the FA should have done something about the abuse, which was homophobic, even though he wasn’t gay. Somebody should have made a stand against homophobia in football, even though Le Saux wasn’t gay. What kind of environment is English football for gay supporters or even players, if that sort of thing happens to someone?

Even though he wasn’t gay?

You get the idea. Le Saux’s whirling finger of accusation points out the culprits like a spinning bottle and decries the appalling discrimination in English football whilst all the while making it drearily obvious that Le Saux has no interest whatsoever in the lot of the footballing homosexual, but only in the fact that people didn’t like him because they thought he was gay.

Never occurs to him it might have been the other way round.

Interestingly, the gay community themselves are completely silent in this book. Le Saux has no gay friends to offer commentary, no group for LGBT rights offers to take up the cudgel. You would have thought, wouldn’t you, that actual homosexuals might have had something to say about the whole thing. You wouldn’t know from Le Saux. There’s an interesting aspect to it all, though, which may illuminate a lot more about social attitudes to homosexuality than Le Saux’s incessant self-pity ever could. At almost no point in the entire narrative, or in my recollection, does anybody actually BELIEVE Le Saux is gay. And there’s the rub. His team-mates might shout “Arses to the wall, boys!” when Le Saux walks into the shower, but no-one actually DOES it. People might shout abuse at him, but no-one ever treats him with the same kind of quiet, venomous disgust or distaste that, say, Justin Fashanu encountered. To compare his experiences with what an actual gay footballer might go through is to grossly trivialise; besides, it’s almost certain that there ARE homosexual footballers in the professional ranks, and if we don’t hear 50,000 fans shouting that so-and-so takes it up the shitter it’s not because they don’t know if they’re gay – since when has the truth ever got in the way of a good singsong? – it’s because nobody dislikes them enough to pretend that they are. People call Le Saux gay because he doesn’t like it and they don’t like him. That’s all there is to it.

Le Saux has an Alan Partridge-esque capacity for failing to identify and eliminate the details of any story which make him look like a prick. As a result, his self-pitying narratives of victimisation convey all too well what is going on, and what is normally going on is that someone is winding him up because he is a smug, boring knob with no emotional intelligence whatsoever; and very little intelligence of any other kind. Everywhere Le Saux goes, someone is treating him badly, unjustly, unfairly. Players, fans, directors, managers, all of them, picking on him, for no plausible reason that Le Saux can intuit. Normally we would take these tales of woe with a pinch of salt, and yet we believe everything Le Saux says about the shoddy treatment dished out to him, normally with a quiet exhalation of “And no fucking wonder….”

What it all boils down to is class. Le Saux waltzes off the tax-haven of Jersey into a working-class changing-room and finds it hard going. When he returns to Chelsea during the Gullit revolution to find the club run by a bunch of cosmopolitan polyglots, why, he’s as happy as a sandboy. Before then, well, it is too much to say he struggles to adapt – he doesn’t EVEN struggle – but then, most of us can empathise with what it’s like to be an outsider. Those of us who are actually from the working classes are made to feel like outsiders everywhere we go. Le Saux only gets left out by his workmates – working class folk in middle class environments get bullied by the fucking furniture.

Bill Bryson. I don’t suppose you’ve got much of a chance, really, if that’s your name. What else can a Bill Bryson grow up to be but an avuncular fat four-eyes, with his shirt collar sticking up through the neck of his mauve cardigan? Yes, true, but he didn’t need to be such a cunt about it.

It’s the manufactured tweeness, the void of intellectual curiosity that does it for me. It’s like he’s writing from the Restaurant at the End of the Universe, where everything that’s ever going to be known or discovered already has been, and since there’s nothing new to say all that matters is how you say it. And as far as that goes, Bill Bryson has set his fucking stall out, make no mistake.

The next time the Mormons come to your door, don’t turn them away. Be nice. Take one of their lifestyle magazines. Read it. It’s the same thing. Total walled garden. Everything you need to know about everything, from mainframe programming to Manchester United, is in the Bible and the Book of Mormon. Anything else, if it’s acknowledged at all, is presented in the “Did You Know…” format of quirky condescension and eye-rolling tolerance. “DID YOU KNOW that Manchester are estimated to have nearly 100,000 followers? By comparison, the Latter-Day Saints Movement can boast more than 15 million members! (Sorry, Sir Alec!)” Bill Bryson’s the exact same. His books hint at nothing outside of themselves, nothing but the sleepy turnings of a comfortable mind. No way out. No way out.

And the childish ingenuities! The dumb bookending of his dumb books in the formula “Aren’t post offices funny things?”/”Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have some letters to post.” You can almost hear the self-satisfied pause, see the red-faced, scarcely-repressed beamer as the mums and grans at the school assembly go fucking mental. “Thank you, thank you, William!” the headmaster bellows over the deafening applause, “What a wonderful insight into post offices from one of our school’s most talented pupils!” Bleuch. Probably I’m missing something. Well, I just hope I go on missing it.

Mehran Karimi Nasseri has, indeed, lived in an airport; for about 18 years, in fact. He has not, however, learned to cope, fallen in love with an improbably gorgeous airline employee, or been stranded by adminstrative catastrophe. He is not clever, amiable, or infinitely resourceful, struggling cheerfully to work his way out of a tought spot. He is simply, sadly, beyond all shadow of a doubt, mentally ill.

The “co-written by Andrew Donkin” autobiography is not explicit about this. It allows Nasseri the same stilted unreflective self-expression and obsessive repetition of the narrator of The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, and depicts without alloy the autism of his behaviours; his compulsive hoarding, his inability to comprehend other human beings, his attention to tiny detail at the expense of the bigger picture. It’s a bit like watching a YouTube walkthrough of Might and Magic VI uploaded by an agoraphobic; Nasseri plunges straight into the dank dungeons of his logic, promptly gets lost, then spends the rest of his time turning away from exits like they were dead ends. Initially, his refusals of help play like pig-headedness, an unwillingness to accept parole on any terms other than his own. Over time, as his demands and pseudo-concerns become more and more unrealistic, it becomes clear that he is simply determined never to leave the airport, and has accepted his life there as being a good one, or the best of a bad job. He has money, food, stuff enough to keep him happy. He’s taken care of. Nothing too terrible can ever happen to him there, under the constant watchful eye of local celebrity and CCTV. Most importantly, he’s somebody. Nobody special, to be sure, but still and all, he’s somebody. That guy on the airport bench. Look at everybody looking at him!

Much of the book is concerned with identity. National identity, obviously, and familial identity too, courtesy of a subplot about Nasseri’s dubious parentage. But these are just signposts, though, and the real business of the day is just that of asking “Who am I? What’s the point of me?” By sitting on his little bench like a statue on a museum plinth, a bored, wing-clipped macaw on a conservation branch, Nasseri has found a way of being which doesn’t actually necessitate the frightful responsibility of being anything in particular. Yes, Nasseri is a spare part, of course he is; but what does that make the rest of us but cogs?

Almost all of us are, in one way or another, sitting on our little airport bench, barricaded by the piles of stuff, the towers of brittle newspapers with our names in them. That’s what this book is about. You wouldn’t know it from the cover, which makes Nasseri seem like some sort of cross between Che Guevara and the Fonz. He’s not. He’s empty. It’s not “one man/team/country’s quest to…” It’s about a guy who is very sick in a way which most of us are only a little ill.

What I am trying to illustrate is how much of one’s experential data is based on the reality of films and TV rather than the reality of you, getting up and having some tea and walking around for a bit. Running parallel to my life, like any number of sandalled shoeprints on the sand in that Jesus thing, are alternative histories beyond count, paths which segue into and merge with and ultimately take over entirely from the blander and more banal periods of my existence. I don’t always know that this has happened; they are just lurking, waiting, there, ready to be discovered when I open my mind’s book to the entry for hedgehogs and find some crudely cut-out pictures of Sonic plastered all over the page. And time and time again, on idly flipping through that book, where broad scientific and philosophical theory had once formulated itself, sometimes neatly, sometimes sprawlingly, into my chaotic worldview, there now stands only three italicised words; See Italo Calvino.

Everybody should have their Bible, their great book of consolation. It has its specifications. It should be thick enough to stop a bullet in your breast pocket, but thin enough to be digested at a single sitting when most needed. Common enough to cheer you from the shelves of bookstores and libraries, rare enough for passing it on to be a hushed and hallowed ritual. It should not be the book you talk about most; rather, it should be the book you talk about least. If anyone else you meet should have read it, you are their brother. If anyone else should ever read it because of you, you are bound to them forever by hoops of steel and ichor; so choose carefully!

Then if you have read Italo Calvino’s strange and beautiful fantasy of Kublai Khan and Marco Polo, which takes about as long to read as the train journey from Hamilton to Dumbarton Central and people you loathe and a job you hate, you are my friend. If one day you read it because I have mentioned it, you are more, even, than that, wordlessly enmeshed with me in the most profound links of love and debt (instantly redeemable for one drink and possibly one muffin at any Scottish bar or café). And if you have read it and don’t like it, I don’t know what to say to you, probably never will.

If anyone ever interviews me (and they might) and asks me about the main influences on my writing rather than why I feel uniquely qualified for this position (and they won’t), by God I’ll have a lot to say about it. I am the ultimate novelistic magpie, a patchwork quilter of poetry, a concordance of killer adjectivisation; a list of my literary influences would read like the tearful excesses of Oscar night, a long stream of shout-outs to Shakespeare and Byron and Larkin and Calvino, with my parents tacked thoughtlessly on at the end.

My family all speak lower-class Scots dialect. I don’t and never really have, learning my childhood English from books and the BBC. Yet whenever I’m home I feel obliged to perpetuate the fiction that aye-but-how-no’-jist-cos is the way I’ve always spoken, as if by some superior heft of revisionist history I can convince everyone that I am not ashamed of where I came from and never have been. Lies, lies, all lies. This paragraph too, for implying that the studied neutrality of my accent resulted from the happy accident of a hermetic childhood. Bullshit. I stomped those missing g’s and glottal stops like they were weeds in the pre-paradise of my Eden, biting back “broons” and “aboots” with relish and abandon. Ugly language spoken by uglier people. Get thee behind me!

But recently, though, I have found myself reintroducing some of those words and inflections to my vocabulary, with all the shame-faced furtiveness of a company repackaging old products as “classic”. There are reasons for this, some more ignoble than others. Worst and most true is that my past has, from being a handicap worthy of shame, become a handicap overcome, something to be pointed at and proud of, like how the word ‘alcoholic’ is a matter of self-loathing to the drunk but a badge of honour to the twelve-stepper. Still. As the twelve-stepper would say, fake it till you make it, and by pretending that I have never covered up my Scots dialect I am finding a fresh appreciation for the language and its unique kind of lilt and lyricism. Macdiarmid has entered the canon of little lyrics my mind reads to itself in repose, the inner actor on my inner stage declaiming “There’s naebody but Oblivion and us/Puir gangrel buddies wanderin’ hameless in’t.” And I see now how the apparent lazinesses of Scots, the dropping of hard sounds, the cack-handed contraction of disparate phrases, can be harnessed instead of simply overcome. But I still don’t know what to say in it that I couldn’t say just as well and better in English.

So what I am saying is that native dialects don’t have to be the grunting crudenesses of Mellors from Lady Chatterley’s Lover. Take Para Handy, for instance. I doubt that there is anything sweeter in the Scots language than these little tales of the puffing Vital Spark and its picaresque cap’n. And even these are written in English, with only the crew’s dialogue in Scots. Their words are Scots, the world they occupy, English. And so it is. Cut adrift in a foreign world of things, divided from strange times by seas and language, Para Handy and his crew have no resource but their innocence, Scots hearts, Scots tongues. And they are still out there today. We all are. But we survive somehow. We make do.

Sweet serendipity! When you take reading seriously enough all element of surprise goes out the window as you structure and prioritise like Burgess Meredith in “The Twilight Zone”: this pile for August, this pile for May, this pile for October! And, yes, there is satisfaction in seeing the tidy staircase of books disappearing off into the intellectual giantness of one’s future. But you forget what it’s like to like something by accident; how things were in the beginning, before you knew anything, when every volume was stumbled privately upon, and every sentence as secret as The Neverending Story. Which is all to say that one day I noticed that now familiar title on an aged orange spine.

You know the old stylistic trick in crappy sci-fi or horror movies of filling in the gap between one scene and another with the title card “New York. 10 years later.” or something? Like most idiocies it harms you, even if you’re aware of how stupid it is, because it innures you into thinking of Time as just another plot device, a way of explaining the switch from X to Y, a beeping red digital timer of forced urgency. You forget that Time is not really like that, that for all our linguistic conceits about spending it or saving it or wasting it Time is just something that happens and goes on happening. “Sad Café” is full of these little interludes in which nothing happens but that Time Passes, except that in a strange and lovely way they are not so much like interludes as mainstays, as if a play were not the performance itself but the bits in between, the invisible stagehands, the switching scene, the falling lights and curtain. It’s not the stately ermine sweep of Time’s Majestic Procession in a Russian epic, or Time the Destroyer kicking the fuck out of Ozymandias, but Time so shy, so gentle, that it hardly dares to make the grass grow, that we scarcely even notice it until it’s gone.

And I could tell you the story, but what would be the point? It could be any story happening to anyone anywhere, except that like every story it happens there, and then, to them, and nothing like it will ever happen again.

“The Napoleon of Notting Hill” ends after a war, in a place in which there was total darkness for hours, and also for hours total silence. Through this darkness, two voices contend whether it was all worth it, all this human strife and suffering over something so tiny and insignificant. What, after all, would have been the difference to the world if Notting Hill had never existed?

“The same that would have happened to the world and all the starry systems if an apple-tree grew six apples instead of seven; something would have been eternally lost.”

The reason I bring this up is because, unwittingly or otherwise, Amis in his novels makes having a hangover more appealing than actually being drunk. Drinking, in Amis, is not really that much fun, just something that people do from motives of ennui or escape, a self-administered soporific which just makes people less and less aware of being more and more of a boring wanker. It’s only when people are hungover that they’re alive again, agonisingly so, every sense turned up to eleven, to the torrential tap, to the scouring pads of pillows.

There’s always that next-morning moment when your consciousness, so joyously mixed up in the holistic whole of experience, slowly comes back to you. This is what should be called the “Fuck, I’m me.” moment, when it occurs to you that you are not merely part of the hilarious pantheistic compound that is Life. No! You are explicitly and specifically you and, as you remember it, being you really isn’t that great: certainly not if what you feel like right now is anything to go by. And, to Amis, it’s all like that. Drinking. Sex. Love. Everything.

Still. All in all. I’d rather be me than no-one.

Having scarcely been involved since the start of the second half, my wavering attention had more or less attached itself exclusively to making ineffectual efforts to calm my friends down. The usual last-minute nerves in complete subsidence, even as we prepared to face a corner, I watched with concern as the lad jostled and barged around the penalty box. It was coming. And so was the corner, a decent one if with a little too much hangtime, curling back in towards goal but so slowly, with so far to fall, that I was under it all way, watching it lazily bend back to the near post and straight through my wet, complacent gloves.

I didn’t spin quickly enough to see the defender on the line punch it clear, and not until the red card had been flourished at his receding back did I realise what had happened. The redhead was already placing the ball on the spot. Somebody found it deep within themselves to say something encouraging; everybody else, I knew, could not have hated me more, the responsibility for all the unbearable, ginger-heided gloating that was coming our way subtly deflected from me to him. He stood with his hands on his hips, not a shimmer of anticipative joy or even suspense in his demeanour. I waited. A whistle blew, I think. He strode purposefully up.

It was a poor penalty, passed weakly towards the bottom-right corner of the goal, and even in midair I had time to be surprised, relieved that I had guessed right and was going to be behind the ball even in time to grasp it firmly, clasp it to my chest as I climbed first to one knee then to my feet, the roar of relief and tsunami of hair-rubbing, back-patting hands some counterbalance to the strange feeling of anticlimax, the realisation that through euphoric rose-tinted views of a one-time event no-one except me and Ginger would ever know or care that it was as woeful a penalty as had ever been struck, a trundler, slower and slower each time I remembered it, practically snagging to a halt in the long thick grass.

On my way back to the changing rooms I spotted the guy hanging disconsolately around the corridor, and as his eyes flashed up to meet mine I thought for a moment, just for a moment, I caught a glimpse of something like inner pain and hurt, confusion, the incomprehension of a wounded child. Elated still, relieved, magnanimous in victory, I curved the corners of my mouth into a smile of the most sincere sympathy and understanding, my right eyebrow simultaneously twitching upwards in wry acknowledgement of, nay, resignation to the ineluctable fickleness of the Fates and Football.

“Whit’s the smile fur.” he croaked, with a sullen menace which made all too clear the fact that I was being done a professional courtesy by having the appropriateness of my facial features queried rather than instantly and violently reconstructed there and then. Making the necessary adjustments, I hurried past and on into the rest of my life.

I am not very good at telling stories, and whenever I tell this one people automatically assume that the point of it is that the guy was a wanker. Well, so he was, but so what? Virtually everyone you ever meet is. As a matter of fact, the story is about how I am a wanker, a point not clear to anyone who doesn’t know me and can’t therefore envisage me striding down that changing room corridor, a smirk of the most transparent smugness and superiority plastered across my face, my eyes glittering with a scarcely concealed inner life of pirouetting down Paris streets and turning somersaults in San Diego, and you supposed to be consoled by it! Because the primary reason for my rubbishness as a person, I have always been convinced, is not that my feelings are less virtuous than anyone else’s but that I am much less adept at conveying feelings I do not have, and that it always goes so much the worse with me because I try to look sympathetic about things I do not, in fact, give a shit about. And so with everything. My attempts at practical jokes invariably undermined by my inability to conceal my delight at my impending delight, my sallies in lulling peoples’ suspicions interrupted by frequent bouts of random and staccato giggling.

So I have no poker face, for a start. I will also never be able to ghostwrite someone else’s autobiography, as what is always most striking about the by-the-numbers celebrity autobiographies which brandish our unglamour at us in shops through winter windows is not that their voices are false per se, not that they are delivered in a manner of self-expression wholly alien to our previous experiences of Posh Spice and David Beckham, but that they are not like any people we have ever met before, ever. Sports journalists routinely formalise the inarticulate grunts of athletes into semi-coherent platitudes, but ghost-written autobiographies are not usually just that kind of bland translation exercise, because it is never just the language that is wrong but also everything which ought to underpin it, our basic human assumptions, common sense, the very idea of a sentient being committing it to paper: it is as if some uncomprehending but basically sympathetic order of life form is writing a novel about what it is like to be a human, with about as much success and insight as Anna Sewell in conveying what it is like to be a horse. Take Amarillo Slim’s autobiography, for example. The fizzy, folksy, Wayne-Western language is, for all I know, exactly how Slim really speaks. But what lies behind it? Everywhere you poke the facade crumbles away like soil, like papier-mache, and the creepy conclusion is that, like Patrick Bateman, the real Amarillo Slim is simply not there. Perhaps he is not anywhere. Perhaps no-one is, and everybody everywhere is the same kind of static, fragile abstract of a once shared memory of mankind. For a boy whom Invasion of the Body Snatchers scared near to death, these are not welcome or comforting thoughts.

Imagine that I, immediately upon commencement of this review of Patricia Cornwell’s “Portrait of a Killer”, were to segue into a discursive essay on the subject of the paper on which the book is printed. Who produced it? Where? How? What exactly is its material composition? How is the paper in the hardback different from that of the paperback, or the British edition from the American? And say then that I was to marshall a numbers of facts pertinent to the solution of the above questions, shored up here and there with enough speculation to make my conclusions doubtful and enough name-dropping to make my motives even more so. If I was then to present this somewhat contentious argument to you as irrefutable PROOF of the errant stupidity of Cornwell’s book, well, gentle reader, what might you think? I, in the true spirit of Cornwellianism, will TELL you what you might think. You might think that my argument has more or less made sense; at no point has your knowledge or intuition regarding the manufacture of paper ran contrary to mine; and if, in the course of my burbling enthusiasm, I have stretched a few possiblys into probablys, well, that is only to be expected in a work of this nature. Essaying the facts at your disposal, you may be inclined to conclude that my argument, if not exactly watertight, certainly constitutes a respectable enough theory in regard to the book-production process, and that whilst in some regards I have perhaps added little to the fund of human knowledge about ink, say, or the glue in the hardback binding, I have provided an adequate explanation of the facts of the matter as they appear to stand. It is perhaps not altogether clear to you in what relation the paper from which the book is composed stands to the quality of the book itself, but clearly there must be SOME connection, and as my handling of all other aspects of the debate -some of which, it is to be admitted, were somewhat beyond your understanding in any case- was clearly astute, you are willing to concede that it is your own obtuseness or inattention to detail which has led, in this particular instance, to your failure to comprehend my reasoning. Indeed, you could go back and read it all again, find out what it was that passed you by first time around, but frankly you are getting a little tired of reading about paper, and possibly would not have bothered embarking upon my opus magnum if you had known that that was what it was all about. Still, the central thesis stands good, you have learned something, and should intelligent conversation turn Cornwell-wards at a dinner party, you will be adequately equipped to pronounce upon the stupidity of her work, if in somewhat sketchy detail.

Possibly you think I am joking, or at least enjoying the self-indulgence of an extended metaphorical conceit. But no. “Portrait of a Killer”, ostensibly Patricia Cornwell’s irrefutable identification of Jack the Ripper as the artist Walter Sickert, is actually a book about paper. Through long and windy recapitulations of scientific analyses into the paper on which the Ripper letters to the Police were written, Cornwell advances her central thesis that we can’t PROVE Sickert didn’t write any of the Ripper letters and, therefore, between August and November 1888, was gruesomely a-murdering of at least five London prostitutes. (Many more according to Cornwell, who finds the Ripper’s fingerprints everywhere, and is ripe pickings for an Internet meme featuring pictures of Jack the Ripper killing JFK/Cock Robin/the ’72 Denver Broncos.) You the reader! You need know no more than that of the vast proliferation of Ripper-related correspondence of the time only one or two are accepted by Ripperologists as genuine candidates for authentic Ripper authorship, the rest being uniformly fakes and frauds and attention-seeking copycats. Even if Cornwell, as she never does, proved that Sickert HAD written one of the letters, she would have uncovered no more than a perhaps sordid sense of humour on his part. So that won’t do, and is the end of any serious scholarship or debate in either her book or this review.

The rest, to paraphrase Shakespeare, is daftness, overladen with the cheap narrative devices of detective fiction. A ridiculous, overwrought prologue, in which Cornwell grapples with the shattering knowledge that she is the only person who knows who the Ripper is and must pass alone into the murk and gory gloom of his psyche there to etc. The breathless passages of forced psychological tension and fear in which we are given to believe that the Ripper watches her every move, possessing all the spectral, timeless powers of Freddy Krueger. The spiralling-abyss-of-men’s-souls monologue on motive-explaining madness. The emotive melodramatic outbursts against Sickert, establishing the intimate, ineluctable bond of fate and hatred between killer and detective, the fucking fanfare of kazoos which heralds every so-called discovery! “Whit a performance!” my gran used to say of any ham-fisted attempt at effect; it is to be wished that Patricia Cornwell’s gran had been so brutally and uncompromisingly frank.

And so on. All arguments about the physical and mental qualities and aptitudes of the Ripper, his height, weight, anatomic knowledge, handwriting and so forth, are airily dismissed by Cornwell on the basis that Sickert was a man of infinite leisure and resources, a veritable Bruce Wayne of crime who could very well have spent his spare time learning calligraphy/surgery/the violin/the art of disguise/the Charles Atlas program/how to grow shorter in seven easy steps. How Cornwell’s Sickert found the time off from night school to go around butchering people is anybody’s guess, especially seeing as he was clearly spending his daylight hours in profitable study of train and boat timetables, making sure he could get back and forth from holidays in France and still have time to get a nice little murder under his belt. I am much cheered by the thought of a clockwatching Ripper suddenly abandoning his latest mutilation midway through for a passenger-pleasing pursuit of the last City bus, jeering, drunken students egging him on through the back window as he pants pathetically along as fast as his fat, blood-soaked little legs will carry him.

It is a stupid book, but does the person stupid enough to have written it actually exist? Is the whole thing rendered more palatable by the hypothesis of a cynically manipulative Cornwell counting on her readers’ idiocy, or by a supremely arrogant moron who genuinely thinks that she has succeeded where Scotland Yard’s finest, and over a hundred years of dedicated scholars and researchers, have failed? Is Jaws 3 worse because it doesn’t know it’s bad, or Jaws 4 because it knows and doesn’t care? A question to perplex the sages: someone needs to find out what kind of film they were recorded on.