The death of Howard Marks has given me an idea for my next short story

The death has been announced of Howard Marks, who in his lifetime morphed from large-scale cannabis smuggler into counter-cultural celebrity lionised as Mr Nice by left-liberals everywhere. James Brown of Loaded magazine describes Marks as a "true modern-day folk hero", who "stood for everything we loved" and "is a bloody great example to us all". 
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/04/11/mr-nice-howard-marks-dies-of-cancer-at-70/

Marks himself described his career in no less glowing terms:-
     "Smuggling cannabis was a wonderful way of living - perpetual culture shock, absurd amounts of money, and the comforting knowledge of getting so many people stoned."

My perspective on Mr Nice is somewhat different. I know, I know, de mortuis nil nisi bonum and and all that jizz. But I speak as one of the so many people he got stoned. I was introduced to cannabis at the age of 15, at around the time Marks was consorting with such beacons of moral excellence as Pablo Escobar and the IRA. I subsequently spent a quarter of a century as a wake 'n' bake stoner, from when my weed habit became entrenched in my early 20's, until I eventually managed to kick my addiction - yes, hippies, addiction - two and a half years ago.

So, in my estimation, Mr Nice was actually rather unpleasant, an opinion corroborated when I came across this account by his former wife of the destruction wrought by this preening narcissist on his own children:-
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-1187009/Mr-Nice-More-like-Mr-awful-father---Ex-wife-drug-smuggler-Howard-Marks-tells-destroyed-family.html

Mr Nice went through life sublimely untroubled by the wreckage he left behind him, succumbing eventually to cancer of the colon. I consider it fitting to commemorate his passing with a short story. "Mr Nice's Bottom" is just waiting to be written.

So long, Mr Nice, and thanks for all the memories. Cunt.

And yet another Twisted 2 entry

This afternoon, I completed and submitted to Twisted50/2 the first draft of my latest short story.

The Telescopic Philanthropist's Modest Proposal is about Drusilla Kaftanjellyby, a morally undernourished aid worker in an unnamed country in the grip of war and famine. Drusilla hosts one Mr Marsh-Marlowe, an ineffectual little man whom she believes to be an accountant sent out by the agency in order to question her about the famine relief funding which for ideological reasons she has spent on expensive organic food. Their conversation takes place against a background of artillery fire, controlled by a war lord called Leopold, with whom Drusilla appears to be on very easy terms.

After a while, Drusilla drives Mr Marsh-Marlowe to a restaurant, which turns out to be a very expensive establishment in the middle of a refugee camp full of people starving to death. While they wait for their meal, Mr Marsh-Marlowe reveals that he is actually there at the behest of the Child Protection Unit for Drusilla's local borough back in North London, in order to investigate allegations that she has left her own children to fend for themselves. At this point, however, his attempt to exert himself in his official capacity is interrupted by the reappearance of the head waiter, a Lebanese exile called Pierre, who serves them their braised kid, shot that very morning by one of Leopold's jackasses.

Here's a link to the beast:-
http://twisted-vol2.create50.com/scripts/5706551d6e6f64100f00007d?age=verified

Yet another short story submitted to Twisted50 Vol 2

This one, which I wrote over the last three days, rejoices in the title 'Contracts for the Design of Certain Vulgar Necessities'.

Jissom, who works in some nebular capacity in industrial design, is stranded on the motorway on his way to a conference in The Vale. He is rescued by a heavy smoking alcoholic with a name very much like Wankingstain. Wankingstain takes him to Club, which is inside a building on a dilapidated industrial estate under the flyover. There, Jissom recognises Professor Goetz, a disgraced anthropologist conducting an independent research program focussing on depersonalisation among the gimps who are part of Club's furniture. Drunkenness, escaped gimps, murder, arson, weird funerals, embittered recluses - it's all in here.

http://www.create50.com/scripts/56f3ffac6e6f645d1f000357

The Dharma of the Eye - a New Short Story Submitted to the Next Twisted50 Anthology

The Dharma of the Eye is a peculiar little story about a civilian CCTV operator in Shroud Town. As the New Era approaches and everyone starts wearing their Star Trek uniforms, this overweight enema addict harasses the health service with his digestive Munchausen disorder, wrestles with the singularly unrewarding magical fiction inflicted on him by his vacuous landlady, and drinks cider and pernod alone in the pub. And all along, the Unauthorised Enema Squad have had their eye on him.

http://www.create50.com/scripts/56e9ae8e6e6f645d1f00008d?age=verified

Two Short Stories

In the last few weeks, I've written two short stories:-

(1) The Inanity of the Deed, a 4,000 word adaptation of Conrad's novel The Secret Agent, which I've submitted to The Bristol Short Story Prize Anthology. A sex shop proprietor sacrifices his clueless step-son to an agent provocateur's plot to bomb the local cadet depot, and secures his alibi by participating in an open-mike activist benefit evening, where he reads his excruciatingly bad poetry.
https://www.bristolprize.co.uk

(2) Professor Guzman's PhD Student. Like Inanity, Guzman riffs upon the theme of incompetent terrorists. In the run-up to the election as Prime Minister of a Corbyn-esque useful idiot, ivory tower sociopaths plot to burn a polling station in the Mendips, leading to the deaths of the idiot Greenpeace-ish chuggers hired for this purpose. I've submitted Guzman to the second Twisted50 anthology; readers may recall that two of my short stories - Lolitasaurus and Disaster of the Will - are already on the shortlist for the first Twisted50 anthology.
http://twisted-vol2.create50.com/profiles/richard-craven

Diverse speeches from my play, The Senseless Counterfeit

(1) Suliman's Yoga Creep Speech. Act 1 Scene ii

It seems to me that Shakespeare missed a trick.

He might prophetically have writ about

another age of man, the Yoga Creep,

between his Justice and his Pantaloon,

whose shrivelled member, kept from its repose,

held upright by those blue remembered pills,

twitches in the presence of young hippie chicks.

I see right through you, Sleaze. You’re nothing but

a goat who gulls impressionable youth,

an oniony old sage with borrowed cloak.

(2) Mr Luvvertory on Selling Ketamine. Act 1 Scene i

It’s true. Powder of Equus Tranquillus,

which is to say, that wondrous ketamine,

which makes one snorting it think he’s a worm,

or else an elongated pasta strand.

A true alchemic catalyst is k

makes of the meanest bedsit sumptuous halls,

transmutes the vilest, most disgusting knave

unto the choicest ponce that ever graced the court;

although it’s ultimately bladder-wrack,

causing its hierophants to go around with bags.

A vertically integrated biz:

I cook it up myself in pots and pans.

(3) Slime on Selling Cocaine. Act 1 Scene i

Betimes, I dabbled in an allied trade,

a merchant in Talcum of Medellin, I was,

importing in swallowed prophylacticals

that snuff, for which fine gentlefolk

betaking themselves unto the privy room,

upon the cistern thereof chop it out in lines

and by it most subtly are energised,

which their companions do remark upon

when they resume their wonted dinner seats,

and overbear all others with their rant.

H.G.Wells nails Henry James

As Frances Wilson, writing in the Telegraph, puts it,

"[James's] middle period produced The Bostonians, and The Princess Casamassima, among the least satisfactory of his novels, while the “late style” of The Wings of the Dove, The Golden Bowl and The Ambassadors – which HG Wells compared to a hippopotamus laboriously attempting to pick up a pea that has got into a corner of its cage – sealed James’s reputation as The Master."

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/books/what-to-read/henry-james-a-novelist-for-the-wi-fi-age/


Although I can sort of see the point of The Ambassadors, I still feel that, had I been made aware of Wells's comment before embarking on 'Plomacy, I would have been spared a gruesome ordeal.