100 Books I'll Never Write

It shows inventiveness, it shows a concern for personal appearance, and most of all it expresses a sort of pompadour socialism. The willingness of the more prosperous regions of the scalp to share their wealth with their less fortunate neighbours.

In a unique book that explores the long-overlooked history of this tonsorial triumph I will pluck illuminating examples from the annals of barbering, and explain where it all went wrong for the combover.

Here, by way of an example, is a short clipping from Chapter 12:

Where it all went wrong for the combover, of course is The Beatles. The four loveable mop-tops from Liverpool ruined Western Civilisation with their promotion of the cult of youth, and they ruined middle aged men’s haircut options forever with their luxuriant  fringes.

In the Western world, a shade over 40 per cent of men will experience male pattern baldness by age 35, rising to 70% by the time they reach 80. With four members – five if you include leonine über-producer George Martin – you would expect one slaphead at the bare minimum.

And yet – bald Beatles came there none. Suspicious? Yes.

But I’m not here to promulgate half-baked conspiracy theories about the world’s most beloved beat combo. Not yet, anyway, I’ve got another 33 books to write.

Let us instead review some of the outstanding combovers of the Beatles era. Like Donald Trump’s hair, they divide into three main strands.

The Fulsome: The Fulsome is a bold man’s option. It is a rich, ebullient hank parted low in the ear-zone and swept dashingly over the dome. It’s a risky strategy – all that hair-mass can be a danger-to low-flying aircraft if it works its way loose – and is therefore confined to indoor workers such as radio DJs. The late Sir Terry Wogan sported one of the great Fulsomes of the post-Beatles era, along with radio colleague ‘Diddy’ David Hamilton.

The Three-Strand Sweep: A classic of the form, this lightweight and adaptable combover is perfect for the sportsman – Sir Bobby Charlton springs to mind here– or any rugged action man who spend a lot of his time outdoors in high winds. Prince Charles, for example.

The Backdoor Bandit: The Backdoor Bandit was almost certainly invented by beloved actor Zero Mostel in the early years of the Beatles era, and became a standard combover for balding personalities in the world of entertainment.

Backdoor Bandit practitioners grow the hair long at the back, in the manner of the Billy Ray Cyrus ‘mullet’ style, and then separate a portion of the neck-warmer to brush forward. Slade’s Superyob-in-chief Dave Hill demonstrated this look to great effect but perhaps the most impressive example of the form belongs to wrestler Mick McManus, who managed to maintain full scalp coverage despite some of the gruelling combat action seen by audiences since Spartacus was a lad.

The Combover: A Secret History will sell like hot hairspray not only in bookshops but from special point-of-sale installations in barbers and chemists shops throughout the land.

Books that start with the words ‘The Girl.’ The Girl On The Train, The Girl With All The Gifts, The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, even – keeping it nice and simple – The Girls. 

All of them have sold in decent numbers in the past few years and all of them have, and this is the important part from my personal perspective, all of them have extracted decent advances from financially-strapped publishers in a time when advances are becoming increasingly hard to come by.

I like advances. To get royalties, you actually have to do something. Viz: sell lots of books. Selling books means convincing large numbers of people – publishers, reviewers and readers, that what you’ve written isn’t incoherent hogwash. That’s a pretty big ask, for a writer of my abilities.

By contrast, to get an advance all you have to do is talk a good game to one person. 

Get a commissioning editor on your side and you’re most of the way towards a decent pile of money that you’ll only have to pay back if your book sells. And we both know how much danger there is of that happening.

So, retrieving idea one from the corkboard and stapling it to idea two, if I were to pitch a novel about a commissioning editor who made the classic mistake of reading a manuscript given to them by a pal it would score on multiple levels.

First: it’s a story of someone in the same job as them making a mistake. There are few things more satisfying that a rival crapping the bed, professionally speaking.

Second: it’s got ‘The Girl’ in the title. That makes it a sure-fire winner straight out of the Jiffy Bag. Throw in the fact that I’ve put a more-than-averagely-fruity young miss on the cover isn’t going to harm my chances with (approx.) 50% of the potential audience.

Third, and here’s the kicker: the actual story of The Girl Who Read The Manuscript is one of a someone who works in publishing who read an awful manuscript and spent the following six months avoiding the writer responsible rather than commit the awful faux pas of telling them that their novel stunk the house out.

That will plant in the subconscious of the commissioning editor an ineluctable notion that writers are the kind of people who can turn quite nasty unless you give them a nice advance to keep them quiet.

Most modern books for the young focus on excitement, adventure, humour, and a profound sense of moral justice.

All things that, once these young readers grow to maturity, they will find are lacking in the real world.

Stories about boy wizards giving the bad guy in the nose-cancelling headphones his comeuppance are all very well, but it’s hardly going to teach youngsters valuable lessons about the four ennui-laden decades in a call-centre that await them.

Surely the preparation for the interminable dullness of adulthood is a simply-told tale of a little creature that stays in one place, doing nothing of interest and sucking up other peoples’ crap

And that’s Shelley’s story. Nothing happens to her. There’s no peril, so there’s no danger of story time leading to nightmares. There’s barely any incident at all. The tide washes in and out, and our bivalve heroine resolutely sticks to her rock. And that’s about that.

It’s ripe material for the repetition that professional educators maintain is essential for building language skills, and the literary minimalism represents a sizeable cost-saving too.

Rather than printing dozens and dozens of different pages, all requiring their own printing plate, we just print one. Over and over again. Add in a run of endpapers, carrying my reputable byline and the all-important price, and Bob is almost certainly your uncle. At least that’s what your mum says.

But internet sex doesn’t actually look very much like the sex most of us have at home. While we amateur sexualists see the act of intromission very much as an end in itself, for the online professionals that is a mere amuse-bouche to the weirdly ubiquitous ritual of the gentleman of the sketch spaffing off into the young lady performer’s eyes.

No-one quite knows why this happens. For the gentleman, if you’re finishing the job yourself it seems redundant to have anyone else in the room, bothering you with inconsequentialities. And there can be few if any ladies on this great and diverse planet of ours that actually enjoy an eyeful of jizz making a mess of their Maybelline.

So what if, what if for one second, we posit that all the inexplicable ocular spaffing is a coded message from the illuminati. Perhaps on the mysterious reptile planet from which all our leaders secretly hail, the lady’s…you know… bits are actually conveniently located up in the peepers region, well away from the department that does the wees and such.

It would make perfect sense if you think about it, That way the female illuminati reptilian could have a nice sit down while her evil alien swain goes about his business. And the danger of honeymoon cystitis would be reduced to almost zero. Supplanted by the altogether less debilitating venereal conjunctivitis.

Such a well-rested species would have no trouble at all covertly invading a relative galactic backwater such as the Earth where all the natives are puffed out from inconvenient sexual positions and burning fannies etc.

And that is why my new book – Cumtrails: The secret language of Internet sex is a guaranteed sure-fire smasheroo.

You don’t need an extract on this one. Whatever legitimate criticism can be directed at the quality of my writing, there can be no doubt that I can write sufficient unresearched flannel to fill any given space.

In a world where newspaper circulations are plummeting to new, ever lower, lows and the small amount of news we do still see seems to consist preponderantly of warnings that Brussels are trying to take our kettles and updates on Jeremy Clarkson’s inexplicably buoyant career, it’s quite difficult to know what’s actually going on in the world.

Especially when the newspaper columnists that we once relied upon to tell us what to think about the big issues are increasingly just rolling a tangerine over their computer keyboard a few times, pressing ‘autocorrect’ and saying ‘will this do?’

Who can blame them? After all, what’s the point of researching and writing a set of carefully-honed opinions when the readership barely scrapes into double figures? Unless you’re a dedicated seeker after truth and jotter-down of said truth like what I am, it’s just as easy to pick a side based on who you went to school with, and bash out some old flannel supporting it by the time the pubs open.

If you actually buy a newspaper every day, rather than just pick one up from the ankle-deep snowdrift of freesheets that carpets every modern commuter train, that’s the better part of two quid a day. Six hundred quid a year. For stuff that you could have read on the internet for free the previous evening.

Six hundred quid to be a whole day behind with the news. What if I told you that you could be a whole year ahead of the news agenda, for a one-off payment of just £7.99?

The news calendar repeats, in a surprisingly strict order, every year. With my handy almanac, you’ll be able to brace yourself for the announcement, in early January, of something released under the 30-year rule that you sort of knew anyway. And you’ll be able to rehearse the surprised expression you’ll need to adopt when you learn that the F-list reality ‘star’ who was pictured bursting out of her bikini in the dog days of the previous summer has now released an exercise DVD.

Similarly, you’ll be able to anticipate all the slightly disappointing NASA announcements about not quite discovering alien life, all the High Street shop closures, the quarterly celebrity Twitter meltdowns, the annual recessions, the predictable furores over top executives’ bonuses, and all the uncorroborated viral videos from China, unexciting sinkholes and completely made-up ‘hilarious’ text message exchanges.

With a supplement explaining why publicity-hungry starlets release slightly fruity Instagram photos and several colour plates of amazing optical illusions guaranteed to bamboozle the dim-witted, Next Year’s News is a complete replacement for your daily newspaper.

Here, by way of example, is the whole of Chapter 12:

And here I am, as ever, with the answer. A collection of fruity novellas that co-exist in one of those modish ‘shared universes’ that get the film companies so gingered-up.

Set in and around a care home where the elderly residents have little to do but get up to concupiscent mischief, this series of interlocking stories about… to be frank… interlocking people will provide big-budget thrills at pension-money prices.

With a rotating cast of characters, this is a sexy Decameron for the Sheltered Housing Set. Here’s a list of the first half-dozen titles and summaries

Bonk of Condolence

– She gatecrashed three funerals a week. And she wasn’t there for the sandwiches.

Herbert becomes a Non-Dom

– He hoped Marjorie would take him to her Magnolia Room Of Discomfort, but he just ended up taking the bins out.

Age-Gap Romance

– He was 93, she was only 78. But their love added up to more than 69

Elasticated Slacks

– They took 21 days to arrive from the company in the back of the Radio Times, but they came off in seconds.

Suck My Werther’s

– I can’t even print the description of this one.

Rascal Girl

– She ran with the mobility scooter gang for kicks, but Janice’s taste for bad boys had a terrible price.

Theology occupies a magical middle ground equidistant between fiction and non-fiction. The content of a theology title is based entirely on what the author reckons.

Now, books that reckon there is a God are pretty old news. What's hot right now are books that reckon there isn't.

As an example, let’s look at Dickie Dawkins’s recent smash hit The God Delusion.

It sold like gangbusters to atheists who wanted to be part of Dickie’s club, and it sold equally well to religion fans who were looking forward to being offended. And all it was, when it comes right down to it, was a bunch of stuff that Dickie reckoned.

If you’re ever reckless enough to be critical of religion, and ask how a loving God can permit disaster x or plague y, theologists will explain to you that we should never presume to know God’s plan. Then the following Sunday these same theologists will tell you that they know what God wants you to wear, and what kind of prayers God likes, and which days he likes to hear them on etc. And there’s nothing you can say against any of that, because that’s what they reckon.

And I can reckon as well as anyone else. The only hard part would be finding a new angle on theology. As discussed, there are people writing books saying that there is a God. And there are people writing books saying that there isn’t. But as far as I can tell, there aren’t a whole lot of books asserting that there used to be a God, but he’s now pretty much semi-retired.

And that’s precisely the premise of theological bombshell The God Declension. It’s just the kind of book that gets all the religious people in a bate and makes them talk to the newspapers and the radio about how awful it is and then everybody goes and buys it to see if they’re right and of course they are but not in the way they think, and anyway I don’t care because every one of those profoundly offended people has given me £18.99 in order to be insulted so ha ha.

As an example of how deeply upsetting and wrong The God Declension is, let’s take a look at Chapter 12: A List Of Miracles.

So, let’s start in 4004BC, when most ‘scientists’ agree the entire Universe was created in one very busy week by a young and exuberant God (Genesis 1-2.) Pretty sweet work I think you’ll agree.

And the thing is, even though just creating a Universe would be tiring enough for most people, God also took the time to bury fake dinosaur skeletons some time on that first Saturday afternoon just to troll Victorian scientists some five and a half centuries later. 

There’s a God who’s totally on top of his game, planning wise.

A little later God decides he’s not happy with some aspects of humanity and so murders nearly everyone on Earth in a massive flood (Genesis 7-8). Pretty impressive miracle. Not quite on a par with creating the entire Universe but a solid effort.

But fast forward a few thousand years he’s disciplining some Pharoahs with the rather juvenile prank of letting frogs loose in their bedrooms (Ex. 8:2-14; Ps. 78:45; 105:30.) No flood? No creating the Earth all over again? Clearly a supernatural entity who is running out of puff.

So it continues through the Old Testament. Miracles steadily diminishing in magnitude and imaginativeness. Not withstanding the occasional Swine Suicide (Mark 5:1-20) the long slow declension goes on thorugh the New Testament as well.

Now, I’m not criticising this omnipotent and evidently short-tempered superbeing who is not above sending bears (2 Kings 2:24) to assassinate people who have bad mouthed him. 

Not in the least. I’m just observing that perhaps that whole ‘creating the visible Cosmos in a week’ plan might have been a touch overambitious and that he needs to recharge his batteries before he does anything like that again.

There’s another twenty-odd chapters of that stuff. Just things I reckon. And all we need is an angry bishop to condemn it on Thought For The Day to get the marketing campaign off to a thunderous start.

Over the course of writing and failing to sell my previous 59 books I’ve learned a great deal. Specifically I’ve learned about how hard it is to keep thinking up new ideas for books. And perhaps more importantly I’ve learned quite a lot about what makes a person not buy a book.

A series of books is best for a writer. Thinking up a brand new idea for a book is an exhausting business, but once you’ve got a series going you don’t need to worry so much about all the ‘thinking up ideas’ stuff and just crack on with the typing,

The typing’s actually quite relaxing. Pop your special writing playlist on iTunes. Big old glass of Malbec. Woof! Away you go.

But conversely multi-volume series can be a turnoff for the reader.

The first book in a series is a bit of a gamble.What if the series doesn’t continue? Equally, what if I’m starting too deep into the series and I don’t understand what’s going on and who these people are?

That’s why I’m starting my ‘Jobs of the Future’ series with Number 12.  That’s been scientifically estimated to be the perfect point in the series to attract readers who are afraid they’re missing out. And indeed the whole series is cunningly calculated to attract the FOMO demographic.

And my ability to not only dream up futuristic jobs such as Social Profile Enhancement / Reputation Management consultant and come up with memorable acronyms for them, that has to be a plus too, right?