Atlantic-bridging gratitude to Rob Ferber and Amanda McCutcheon who have pre-ordered not one but 3 copies of 'The Investigations of the Para-Usual'. We met a few years back in Thailand. Rob runs tours in wildest New Jersey (www.pinelandsadventures.org), planning to carry on the theme (probably) into the lunch breaks at Bada Bing! Amanda is an amazing artist - check out her stuff at www.amandamccutcheon.com

Extract from Chapter 35 of mystery-comedy novel, 'The Investigations of the Para-Usual':

Ding Dong! The doorbell sounded. O’Singh looked around as if uncertain of the source of the sound, then clomped his way over the parquet flooring down the long hallway to the apartment’s front door. O’Singh snapped open the door. A large dog stood there on two legs.

O’Singh dithered as though trying to recollect whether he had ordered an upright dog, then in recognition…

‘Dr Pratt! How wonderful!’ he exclaimed, joyfully.

‘Fluff!’ muttered Dr Pratt, as he heaved himself unceremoniously past the professor.

‘I may call you Dr Pratt, may I not, on a social visit? This is a social visit?’ O’Singh asked, amiably.

‘Fluff at all times,’ answered Dr Pratt a.k.a. Fluff, wearily. ‘Do you know what it’s like being a Labrador security dog?’

O’Singh pondered.

‘The Labrador is not renowned for its aggression,’ informed Dr Pratt. ‘A slight oversight on your behalf, O’Singh, since you suggested this costume for a security job.’

O’Singh formed an elongated ‘O’ with his mouth, expecting further chastisement. He hesitated then led Fluff off down the hallway.

‘I’m having to overcompensate with the aggression in order to keep down my position,’ continued Fluff, in O’Singh’s wake. ‘It’s draining. Requires constant mindfulness. Have you ever tried it as an overcompensating Labrador?’

O’Singh glanced back at Dr Pratt, eyes narrowed, like he was thinking, ‘Have I now? Or was it as an undercompensating Labrador?’

Extract from Chapter 33 of mystery-comedy novel, 'The Investigations of the Para-Usual': 

‘Now you know I ‘ave not before employed what would you call yerself? – sort of a pantomime dog? But, ‘ere you are, and I do admire your preparedness. There, good word that “preparedness”. But you would ‘ave to play the part, you do know that?’

Dr Pratt’s Labrador stared back at Higgins, impassively, as the security guard took an opportunity to gulp tea from a mug.

‘Oh, very good. Can’t speak. ‘Course you can’t,’ said the guard, post-gulp. ‘Cat got your tongue.’

Higgins licked his lips to aid a thought process, then recommenced.

‘Name?’ asked Higgins. Forgetting himself immediately and his canine interviewee’s limitations, he reached across and grasped the metal tag dangling from Dr Pratt’s collar.

‘Fluff’, said the name tag, the name that Dr Pratt, former Head of the IPU, would carry henceforth.

‘Fluff,’ mused Higgins. ‘Not very butch… but where are my manners?’ he said, springing out of his sponge-haemorrhaging chair to extend a hand. ‘My name’s Mr Wayne Higgins.’

Fluff did not react.

‘Paw!’ ventured Mr Wayne Higgins, hovering over the desk, with his hand still outstretched.

Fluff twitched, but other than that no response.

‘Paw!’ said Higgins drawling the word. ‘Give me your paw,’ more beseechingly.

Fluff pawed at Higgins’ proffered hand. Higgins caught hold and gave it a good shake.

‘Very good. Now, do you have any references?’ asked Higgins, sitting back down to pull the cord hanging around his neck. His reading spectacles bobbled up his face and settled skewwhiff on the bridge of his nose.

Higgins was at first too occupied jiggling his eyebrows at Fluff, beaming at the spectacle trick he’d once again managed to pull off. But then, by degrees he became aware that the job candidate was trying to communicate something. Fluff was nuzzling at the leather case round his neck. Higgins reached across and delved inside the case to produce what was now evidently a tape recorder. As he placed it down on the desktop, Fluff reached over with a paw and triggered the play button.

‘Good boy!’ said a voice above a crackling background. ‘There’s a good boy. Who’s a good boy?’

Fluff stopped the tape and sat back down. Higgins raised his eyebrows, impressed.

‘Very good reference,’ said Higgins, selecting a pen from his blazer pocket in order to make a note on one of the random scraps of paper festooning the desk. ‘You’re certainly a good boy. That’s good for us getting along at least.’

Extract from Chapter 34 of mystery-comedy novel, 'The Investigations of the Para-Usual':  

‘Professor?’ ventured a strangulated voice.

Weaving his way down the pedestrianised Bow Lane in the City, O’Singh checked the screen of his mobile to identify the caller. Clung to his arm was Persil. She was using the professor to negotiate the counter-flow traffic of city bankers as she absorbed herself in something diverting on her phone.

‘Dr Pratt!’ exclaimed O’Singh, taking the call. ‘You sound a little muffled.’

‘I’m in my dog suit,’ muttered Dr Pratt a.k.a. Fluff.

‘That is good news, I hope,’ said O’Singh. ‘Unless you did not get the job and you just like wearing the suit?’ he said, as much to himself as to Dr Pratt.

‘I got the job,’ announced Fluff, abruptly.

‘Fantastic news,’ said O’Singh, ushering Persil into the porch of the church of St Mary Aldermary to avoid the crowds and the first spots of rain.

‘Fantastic news,’ mimicked Fluff, sarcastically, sat in a quiet moment at the reception desk in the Stalingrad House foyer. He was secreting the landline receiver under one floppy ear hoping not to draw attention to the inappropriate behaviour of a dog engaged in a telephone conversation.

‘A couple of weeks ago I was Head of the Investigations of the Para-Usual, a department striving to re-know human knowledge; today I’m Fluff the dog,’ muttered Fluff. ‘Not even that. I’m Fluff, pretending to be a dog.’

‘It represents a start, Dr Pratt. A new, tentative beginning. We shall think of something,’ said O’Singh, positively, lowering his voice as he entered the church. Something caught his eye as he was about to enter the aisle. He checked himself to contemplate a sign – “Dogs not allowed, except guide dogs” – fixed to the wall.

‘I have been talking to a dog and here is mentioned something about dogs,’ thought O’Singh to himself, but for now thought no more of it. ‘Hello, hello,’ he repeated, but there was no response the other end of the line.

Fluff had dropped his phone as a very rotund man in overalls burst through the revolving doors, pulled up and stood then mid-space, looking about him.

Higgins emerged from his office, lunch bag in hand, and noticing the disorientated workman waddled over to see if he could be of assistance. The workman nodded and mouthed something in return.

‘What?’ said Higgins loudly, working on the hypothesis that you might hear someone better if you shout at them.

Extract from Chapter 33 of mystery-comedy novel, 'The Investigations of the Para-Usual':

‘Next!’ called Higgins, the security guard, opening the door to his office out onto the foyer where sat several dog owners with their growling, muzzled charges.

One owner rose from his seat and dragged his sprung-loaded Alsatian across the marble floor.

Five minutes later, dog and master reappeared from Higgins’ inner sanctum and struggled away. Higgins reappeared and looked down the line. More hostile breeds, then sat cross-legged on the last seat, a Labrador. Clearly a man dressed in a dog suit.

‘Next,’ said Higgins, beckoning the disguised Dr Pratt. A security position at the IPU, O’Singh had alluded to at Postman’s Park two days earlier.

Dr Pratt’s Labrador stood up with a small, black leather case slung over one shoulder and padded purposefully towards the office Higgins shared with brooms and a selection of cleaning fluids.

‘Higgins! What the Dickens?’ hollered Woo. Woo strode over from the lifts and across the foyer, surveying with horror the Crufts face-off. Dr Pratt’s Labrador froze. Even before the game had settled on a vertical direction, the game was up, it seemed. Woo must have somehow recognised him.

Higgins stood ramrod straight and prepared to confront Woo.

‘I’m doin’ what you lot do up there,’ squealed Higgins, nodding his head somewhere in the direction of ‘up’ to indicate the upper floors where toiled the white-collar workers.

‘And what might that be?’ asked Woo, slowly circling Higgins.

‘I am interviewin’ with the view to takin’ on a member of staff.’

‘You don’t have staff,’ countered Woo.

‘Ahem!’ coughed Higgins, using the cough as his counterargument. Woo followed Higgins’ eye line to take in the dog candidates.

‘You’re interviewing dogs?’

Extract from Chapter 32 of mystery-comedy novel, 'The Investigations of the Para-Usual':

‘The Government funds the IPU so long as it delivers, yes?’ said Woo. ‘Well, channel the funding, for we shall transfer it to shore up the department in a different guise.’

‘Which guise?’

Woo threw himself in front of Cohen as if to wave down a potentially destructive locomotive.

‘The IOT – The Investigations of the Traditional!’ he announced.

Woo stepped back to make room for the immensity of the idea.

‘Not this again, Woo?’ said Cohen, raising his voice. Cemetery visitors popped their heads above tombstones like morbid meerkats.

‘Nothing to see here,’ Woo assured the visitors. ‘Back to your grieving.’

The men set off again, past a marble statue of Hope depicted as a lady in Roman toga, atop a monstrous block of red granite. The grave it so happened of the Victorian tight-rope traverser of the Niagara Falls, the Great Blondin. Perhaps a man inadvisably advertising his passing when in life he prided himself in defying death.

‘I set up a major project – an investigation into the traditional,’ confided Woo. ‘We discover everything there is to know. For example, what is a traditional house?’

‘What is a traditional house?’ seethed Cohen.

‘Two up, two down.’

‘We’ve been through this before!’ bellowed Cohen.

One of the cemetery visitors, a gaunt middle-aged man, had not left off staring at Woo and Cohen from the Minister’s previous outburst.

‘You, you there!’ Woo snapped at the gawper, then shielded his mouth to whisper to Cohen: ‘What is that ghastly modernist expression, sir, the one that describes the getting over of an adverse situation?’

‘Closure? You mean closure?’

‘You there!’ called Woo, addressing the gaunt man again. ‘Have you nothing better to do? Have you reached so-called “closure” (Woo winced upon pronouncing the term), is that it?’

The gentleman chose not to reply, but instead knelt down beside a plot and began attending to a grave with a garden trowel.

‘That showed that griever,’ said Woo, indicating with a raised upheld hand the direction of another path, which might take them away from the mourning hoi polloi.

Thank you by the way to Janna Grace for her continuing support, for reading extracts as well as pre-ordering a copy of The Investigations of the Para-Usual. I'm reading her book, 'The Talkers are Talking'. I'll get back to you, Janna, when I've finished. All the best, Paul

Extract from Chapter 31 of mystery-comedy novel, 'The Investigations of the Para-Usual': 

‘I think we both know that the IPU’s weightiness is, how should I say, lightened by the pairing of O’Singh with your lovely daughter, Persil?’ suggested Woo.

Woo was taking the air with Cohen, treading a leafy path between the grand Victorian mausolea in Kensal Green Cemetery. An avenue of formidable marble and granite structures, posthumous celebrations of the ego. Gothic turreted castles like St Pancras railway station in miniature; four poster beds accommodating the stretched out likenesses of the deceased; Egyptian obelisks. Rather like the obstacles one might expect on a morbid crazy golf course. Here were buried the kind of people who might well in life have huffed, ‘Do you know who I am?’ at those offending their sensibilities. Who were now saying in effect with their mausolea: ‘Do you know who I was?’

‘We do know,’ replied Cohen, slowly, at last in answer to Woo’s question. ‘We also know that her mother is happy with Persil’s gainful employment,’ he said, studying Woo obliquely.

‘Quite,’ said Woo, obsequiously. ‘Sadly nothing much can come of that union, the partnership of O’Singh and Persil,’ he said, feigning a sadness. ‘That, that meeting of minds.’

‘But we should be okay, shouldn’t we?’ asked Cohen, in hope of a favourable reply. ‘O’Singh was after all running the department more or less? He was the ideas man. He didn’t really need Pratt, did he?’

‘The situation is not so good,’ replied Woo, breezily. ‘The department was perhaps what you might call “stronger” with Pratt. Though, more importantly, he was what should we say, a negative influence?’

Cohen stopped in his tracks, now with the giant cylindrical steel-girder skeleton of the gasometer which stood the other side of the canal from the cemetery looming above the trees at his back. An imposition of the industrial on the spiritual.