The Dark Red Lacquer of the Heart

After a reader wrote to call Archimedes' Fish the most offensive thing he had ever read, I wrote back to say the sequel would be worse. This is the sequel. It is worse.

Where the first book started from a naked duck and a fish, this one started from the most amazingly absurd opening line my brain could muster:

It was increasingly obvious that Thomas Edison's tongue was not nearly as agile as he had suggested by mail, so Archimedes fed the sheep their biscuits and politely excused himself from the study.

From there there was nowhere to go but down. Archimedes and Finley — the fish, who finally gets a name — run into a gimpy butler, then the butler's automaton, and then we discover the automaton (named Elvis) is in love with a bar maid. The moment I wrote "bar maid" I knew where it had to go, and for the rest of the book the poor girl gets progressively more mutilated.

The title was chosen to evoke the steampunk-ish quality the series was aiming at. It is not entirely unlike The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul, for which I apologise to the spirit of Douglas Adams.

Some readers pointed out, rightly, that grown-up books drawn in cartoons might entice children into things they shouldn't read. There are big red warning labels on the back for exactly that reason.

While packaging this one I added a note listing the other books in the series, which was mostly a joke — there was only one other book at the time. I invented as many silly titles as I could. The next was "Poke of the Titans", a title so intensely stupid that I remember thinking: thank god I'm not going to actually write that.