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 check 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 theater 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.
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