INTRODUCTION

      There are many reasons why an author chooses to write a book. Perhaps, like me, they’re being paid a lot of money to write it. Or perhaps . . . nope, that’s all I can think of. The good people at HarperCollins did gently hint that I should make this book more commercial, so I had to ask myself about the nature of what’s popular in our culture. What do people really want? What would we hope to be offered by a book if we were being completely honest? Which is why I started writing the book you now hold in your hands. A crime porno.

      The appeal for me was simple. How hard can it be to write a thousand words of porn every day? I probably text a thousand words of porn a day. The real problem was not only writing porn and letting the whole thing descend into a kaleidoscope of mouths and limbs and cocks and mouths and cocks. Cocks. And tits.

      Hence crime. I’ve never met anyone who doesn’t like a little vicarious contact with crime: from teenagers killing prostitutes in Grand Theft Auto as a bit of light-hearted escapism from their actual sex lives, to the talcum-powder market foaming their knickers at Daily Mail headlines. The appeal is complex but, for whatever reason, it excites us to hear about some cunt getting killed.

      My teenage sexual awakening happened long before the internet. I used to hang out at my local library and scour thrillers for sex. I’d skim the sort of doorstoppers you’d find on your uncle’s bookshelf for words like ‘grasped’ and ‘thrust’. Occasionally looking up to stare slack mouthed at real women trying to borrow books, I rejected the opportunity for precocious learning and memorised reams of disjointed encounters between guilt-ridden adulterers, mercenaries and whores, and even the desperate couplings of a Southern slave plantation. Perhaps this has affected my adult life. I’ve spent this speeding disinterestedly through the bits central to the narrative, desperately looking forward to the occasional sexual episodes, which I haven’t fully understood.

      So part of me imagines this book hitting the Scottish library system, and some wee Wifi-less schoolboy in Penicuik having his aching balls blown off by this filthy lightning bolt of premeditated degradation. Or some guy getting his teenage daughter it as a present, because he remembers me from Mock of the Week. Merry Christmas, love!

      This will be the burning bible of teenage Britain; a suppressed memory; a limping man in a wooden mask announcing with a shriek that he is the only guest of your surprise birthday party; an uncomfortable evening at the launch of a Muslim breakfast cereal; walking into a bar where a pub quiz host’s questions about your private life are met with general laughter and the harsh metallic bleat of a deer; a sore arse; your dog returning home with a swear word shaved into its side. This book will replicate almost exactly the experience of being a guy who gets raped just after getting the all-clear from prostate cancer and, as the rapist says how tight he is, he realises the cancer’s back; it will be a jeering portal into a new dimension of Desperate Iniquity.

      Well, I suppose, to be entirely accurate, I sent HarperCollins the outline of a crime porno and they told me to fuck off. Instead, they asked me to produce what you hold in your hands. I was asked to deliver a humorous topical Christmas book, the sort of thing that raises a wry eyebrow at the news. A Jeremy Clarkson-style slab of bouncy opinion that, with the right cover, might sell well in train stations.

      However, they did say that the introduction wasn’t too important and I could maybe let loose a little there. Most people skip the introduction, and half the people who get a book