Pardon Me: A Victorian Farce
The year is 1896 and following a brief, if lively, spell in the diplomatic corps, Madagan Rùn is being executed for Treason. The prima facie case against him is compelling. Madagan coerced the normally temperate Dr Jameson into raiding the Boer Republic, then tipped off the Boers and pocketed a cheque for 30,000 krugerand.
Now here's the pity of it. All his unfathomable schemes have been driven by a selfless devotion to Queen, Country and Empire. Trouble is, to save himself he must perforce lay bare the grievously stained undercarriage of Victorian high-society: starting with fantastical revelations vis-à-vis the making, lending and subsequent mislaying of the world's first ever celebrity sex celluloid.
No less an august triumvirate than Cecil Rhodes, Joseph Chamberlain and Prince Victor Albert have reason aplenty to pray Madagan takes his secrets with him to the gallows. Sadly for them the florid and faintly familiar Mr Melmoth has just posted a Remington Typewriter® to the Tower and instructed his chum Maddy to tell the old Queen everything. Pardon Me.
Meet the author
James
Roberts is a forty-something indie author and misanthrope who currently resides
in the remoter outreaches of the Highlands of Scotland. He states his
profession as 'freelance copywriter', being far too vain and supercilious to
admit to being 'mostly out of work'. He has previously found gainful employment as a cocktail waiter, a vendor of cleaning cloths, a lecturer in modern history, a car salesman, a private tutor working
with the financially advantaged, a care assistant working with the mentally disadvantaged
and a fruiterer’s assistant. Some of these jobs he was properly qualified for.
The
epitome of the hermetic scribbler, James describes the content of Facebook, Twitter and
Instagram as "nauseatingly narcissistical dribble" and litters his
correspondence with pidgin Latin aphorisms ad adsurdam omne ignotum pro
terribili (as he would say), solely to annoy the younger generation. His
website, www.jamesroberts.scot, where he can be found hiding behind the absurd nom de plume 'The Proprietor', is a
study in self-marketing suicide; eschewing the potted author biog, giveaways
and blog tours expected of the serious indie author, and instead treating his
unfortunate browsers to an outré discussion on the merits of the French post-structuralists
and offering some surprising advice on how to sex the Oryctolagus cuniculus (or rabbit to you and me).
Even
more disturbing, extensive research into the author's background turns up the
following entry on Google: James Roberts
was the best-selling author of over a hundred books on topics as diverse as
railway signalling and marital sex and his work had been translated into
seventy three different languages including Welsh. In 2007 James was jailed for
copyright infringement and serial plagiarism and having sex with a miner {a
Welsh one}.
Recent
telegraphic communiqués with the author have, however, elicited the assurance
that James is now fully rehabilitated and divides his time between performing
highly situational street theatre with live rabbits and lying to the nice
people at Job Centre Plus.
Pardon Me: A Victorian Farce is his first
novel. Or so he says.
Pardon Me is available from
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