Serial Killer Part II: Chapter 16
As Dave left the Underground at St Paul’s, he still recalled that sense of outrage. No one was allowed to touch his mum. He barely tolerated his dad touching his mum. Yes, it still looked like an open and shut case to the Liquorice Detective. Something had clearly been ‘going on’ between his mother and the Canon. And his father had pointed an accusing finger at the cleric. The Canon was definitely implicated in his mother’s murder. He was still the prime suspect.
His mother had not elaborated further on the subject, but that was because Dave had blocked her from his mind.
Right now, he had more serious matters to attend to: working on Laarf!
Even though the comic proudly claimed it was ‘Number One for Fun! A Mirthquake every week, Pals!’ it was, sadly, anything but. He’d pleaded with his boss, Ron Punch for a suspended sentence. ‘I can’t face being demoted to Laarf! The next step down is Sewer and Septic Tank Monthly: I think I’d prefer that. Or Incontinence Quarterly.’
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Ron was immune to his pain. ‘That’ll teach you, son. A few months on Laarf! will wipe that fucking smirk off your face.’
‘Don’t take that away from me, Ron. Humour is all I’ve got.’
‘Well, you won’t find any on Laarf! They take their comics seriously.’
‘It’s like a mortuary down there. I’ve seen more life in a funeral urn.’
But now, walking along Farringdon Street, the jaunty, triumphant theme tune of The Great Escape was endlessly being repeated in his head. He really didn’t need that. It just made him feel worse. How inappropriate, he thought. There he and Greg were, doing a three-month stretch on ‘Mirth Row’, and his mother was playing The Great Escape!
He entered the dismal, silent Laarf! offices and his fellow prisoner looked up. Greg was taken aback by Dave’s fashionable new image, but tried hard not to show it. Instead, he sneered, ‘Dentist’s appointment went well then?’
Dave didn’t reply and sat down opposite. They had barely spoken since Blitzkrieg! Greg was still seething after his dreams were destroyed by Dave’s treachery.
Dave took in his terrible new surroundings. There was a poster on the wall of a popular cartoon character, Dirty Barry, covered in sewage. Barry wore short trousers and a red and black striped jersey. Every week he started off clean and ended up dirty. The cartoon’s catchphrase was inscribed on the poster, ‘It’s all right! It’s only Dirty Barry!’
On the wall opposite there was Andy of Andy’s Anorak fame – whom Dave especially despised – giving him a cheery thumbs up. His magical anorak could turn into whatever Andy wanted it to, such as a suit of armour, enabling him to beat up bullies.
There was a clock on the wall with the caption FUN TIME above it. It ticked slowly and ominously.
The low-wattage light bulbs seemed to give the smiling cartoon characters a grotesque and sinister quality.
There were two other empty desks. These were normally occupied by other old lags doing hard time for serious editorial errors of judgement.
Dave wanted to bury his head in his hands and sob. Instead, he made a neurotic bleating laugh, just like Tom Morecambe.
He was starting to crack already.
Greg and Dave worked on in sullen silence, reading page after page of Laarf!, checking for lettering mistakes and occasionally looking up to scowl at each other.
They also had to open and read Laarf! readers’ letters. They wrote in regularly and enthusiastically to say how much they enjoyed Dirty Barry and Andy’s Anorak and couldn’t stop laughing at them.
What was the matter with them, Dave wondered. Were they brain-dead? Was it something in the water, like fluoride, that dulled their senses so they actually enjoyed these crimes against comedy?
No, there could be no excuse and no mercy for the readers, Dave thought bitterly.
Greg held up an original cartoon page of Dirty Barry art and shook his head. ‘I’m not passing this page.’
‘Why not?’
Greg looked accusingly at Dave. ‘Because I don’t want to be accused of peddling filth. Again.’
‘What’s wrong with it?’
Greg handed the page over. ‘It’s obvious.’
Sighing heavily, Dave started to read Dirty Barry.
* * *
Looking smug, with a jaunty cartoon character walk, a clean Barry approached a building inscribed with the unlikely name: ‘Common Cold Cure Research Lab’.
Then he saw a totally implausible elephant’s trunk drooping down out of a window of the lab.
‘Gosh!’ said Barry. ‘They must be testing their Cold Cure on that elephant!’
The elephant’s trunk suddenly stiffened, inflated in size, rose up, and swivelled to point in the direction of Barry. Slime was dripping ominously from the end.
A ‘reader’s voice’ from off picture warned: ‘Jumbo’s got the flu! Look out, Barry!’
Next moment, the elephant sneezed violently and Barry was knocked to the ground by a huge mass of quivering snot blasted out of its trunk. ‘Ooer!’ said Barry.
There was one further lethal squirt from the extended trunk before it deflated and drooped down again.
A worried man in a white coat ran out from the laboratory. He saw the figure lying on the ground, covered in slime. ‘Oh, no!’ he said.
Then he recognised Barry, just visible under the pile of snot, and he looked relieved.
‘It’s all right! It’s only Dirty Barry!’
* * *
Dave recoiled from the vacuous nature of the strip. All the cartoons were just like this. Truly awful.
He started to bang his head on the desk.
Greg waited patiently until he had finished. ‘You see?’ he said. ‘It could seem like the elephant has ejaculated all over Dirty Barry.’
‘I suppose so,’ said Dave despairingly, ‘you’d better replace it with another strip.’
‘Yes,’ repeated Greg. ‘It definitely looks like the elephant has ejaculated all over Dirty Barry.’
And he smiled knowingly at Dave.
Dave wondered what that smile meant. What was he getting at? It couldn’t be that Joy had told Greg how she found him with her fur coat and –? Oh, no, she wouldn’t have?
‘Yes,’ insisted Greg with a big grin. ‘That looks like elephant cum to me. What do you think, Dave? Does that look like cum to you?’
Joy had told him.
Dave nodded, defeated. ‘Yes. Yes. Yes.’
‘But it’s all right,’ sneered Greg and leaned forward to sneer in Dave’s face. ‘It’s only Dirty Dave.’
‘Okay, okay, leave me alone,’ said Dave, slumping forward across the desk.
Greg hadn’t finished with him, though. ‘There seems to be a lot of jizz about at the moment. Take Andy’s Anorak.’ He picked up an Andy page and gave his own freely-adapted version of the character.
‘Don’t you envy me, readers? When I’m wearing my anorak, there’s no chance of my meeting girls. But when I pull my toggle, my anorak changes into whatever I want. I’ve been pulling my toggle for ages, readers. It’s always worked in the past. Two tugs and I’m away.’
Greg paused to allow his sarcasm to sink in, then: ‘What do you reckon, Dave …? Two tugs on his toggle enough? I gather you’re an expert in these matters.’
Dave said nothing, but Greg wasn’t going to let it go.
‘So how are the fur coats, Dave? Had any hot dates lately? A foxy fur? A bear-skin? A nice beaver?’
Dave suffered in silence, his misery complete.
He was used to furrist abuse. In fact, the underlying reason for Dave’s hatred of Laarf! may have been that there were no furry characters in it. They were mainly bland ‘reader identification’ kids. Part of Tom’s winning formula. So there were no talking bears, cats, dogs or rabbits. No one Dave could identify with.
It would be another decade before furry fandom was established, and the furries could start to come out of their hutches. Dave was ahead of his time. So he had to endure this kind of abuse about his preferences, like other persecuted minorities in the seventies.
But maybe, one day, things would change and it would no longer be possible to make furrist jokes about Billy Bobtail, because it was offensive to a man in a rabbit suit.
* * *
Fun Time passed endlessly slowly between ‘Mirthquakes’ on the Devil’s Island of comics. Each key on their typewriters hit the page like a prisoner’s pickaxe breaking rocks on Dartmoor. They dragged themselves into the Laarf! offices every morning, every day shuffling a little slower, a little more downcast, their mood made worse by their hostility to each other.
Dave was ordered to write a fill-in Billy Blower episode as the regular writer was off sick (he often seemed to be sick), and it was crucifying him. Billy was a boy with super blowing powers. He could, for example, inflate balloons in seconds that would lift a house off its foundations and this hugely amused the readers and made him one of Laarf!’s most popular characters.
So Dave wrote a story where, in the punchline picture, Billy Blower had blown vapour words up into the sky that read, ‘Billy Blower blows your mind’.
Tom rejected it with the comment, ‘Hippy angle not wanted.’
Dave’s other suggestions for Billy Blower stories and his blowing powers were unrepeatable and even less appreciated by Tom.
Tom was an affable, likeable, suited and booted editor with a sober fashion sense that did not defer to the sixties or seventies, except for a discreet and very mild Beatles haircut. But his pleasant, easy-going manner hid a steely resolve to enforce his vision of Fleetpit fun factory humour comics.
Not everyone knew how to deal with Dave’s aggressive jibes and cruel comments. They were designed to get under people’s skins and provoke an angry reaction. But Tom was different. He had the perfect defence to Dave’s verbal onslaughts. He just laughed them all off.
As the days painfully passed, Dave tried to explain to Tom what the problem with Laarf! was, and why the comics of Angus, Angus and Angus were infinitely superior.
To which, Tom simply laughed and laughed and laughed.
Dave could see he was getting nowhere, so he tried to find a weakness in Tom’s armour.
‘Humour has never knowingly touched you, has it, Tom?’
Tom once again laughed his strange bleating laugh in response, impervious to the insult.
Dave got ruder yet. ‘Tell me – when exactly did you pass away, Tom? Perhaps I should be contacting you by ouija board?’
Once again, Tom leaned back in his chair, slapped his thighs and laughed. A distinctive, grating, bone-jarring whine, like an infant’s long, drawn-out grizzle. It left Dave impotent with rage.
‘Perhaps you’d like to write William the Conkerer instead …?’ suggested Tom, a sinister gleam in his eye. ‘That writer is also off sick.’
‘Also known as William the Bastard?’ said Dave. ‘On account of how mind-numbing it is to think up stories about a boy who plays with his conkers all day? Nice try, Tom, but I think I’ll stick with good old Billy Blower.’
Tom’s buzz-saw laugh whirred once more into life.
Dave and Greg’s minds were, indeed, being blown. Dave discovered that after just one week on Laarf!, he could no longer read The Guardian, Private Eye or Punch. It was just too hard making out the big words. Even The Sun newspaper was becoming a stretch. And BBC2, the up-market TV channel, was now way beyond him.
There was definitely brain damage.
Dave went in to see Ron to suggest that he got an early release from Laarf! leaving Greg to carry the can and serve out his sentence. Greg was, after all, the creator of Blitzkrieg!, the offending comic. But Greg had been in earlier to blame it all on Dave, so Ron was having none of it. They both had to serve out their sentences.
‘But I can’t face another Billy Blower,’ Dave protested. ‘How can you possibly be proud of a strip like that, Ron?’
‘Course I’m fucking proud of it.’ Ron stubbed a cigarette out, lit another, leaned forward and confided in Dave.
‘It is a work of genius, Dave.’
‘Genius!’ Dave looked incredulous. ‘You mean “genius” as in Shakespeare? You’re putting Billy Blower in the same category as Shakespeare? Tolstoy? Goethe and Cervantes?’
‘Well, you can’t count foreigners, Dave,’ scowled Ron.
‘Cervantes wrote Don Quixote, Ron.’
‘That’s what I mean. He’s a dago. So he’s out for a start. And never mind Shakespeare neither. He’s overwritten and not punchy enough.’
‘This is a nightmare,’ thought Dave. ‘Maybe I’ll wake up and it will all be different.’
‘You see, Tom is the real genius,’ continued Ron, ‘because he has the Formula. Reader identification, Dave. Every reader can identify with Billy Blower. Once you have the Formula, anyone can produce it. Even a fucking chimp.’
‘Even me …’ echoed Dave, the full horror of Ron’s words sinking in.
‘Yeah, even you, Dave. You feed it in at one end and it comes out the other.’
‘I … I am lost for words, Ron.’
‘Well that’s good, Dave. Working on Laarf! is obviously doing you a power of good.’ Ron smiled and prepared to return to his racing papers. ‘Just remember all you have to do is repeat the Formula endlessly. Because that – that – Dave, is true genius.’
‘Fair enough, Ron. Okay, I’d better rejoin the undead.’
‘You do that. And, Dave. I’ve got my eye on you, son. Don’t get any ideas.’
‘I’m on Laarf!, that doesn’t seem very likely.’
‘Well, I’m warning you, son. Watch yourself.’
* * *
The days continued to drag by. The FUN TIME clock seemed different to and so much slower than a regular clock. It delayed to the very last possible moment recording every second, every minute, every hour of their sentence.
Joy came to visit them in their cell.
‘How are you boys holding up?’
‘Could be worse,’ sighed Greg. ‘We could be on the Laarf! Crossword Specials.’
‘The Hole?’ Joy shuddered. ‘Aye, that would be hard time. I’ve smuggled you in an Angus, Angus and Angus comic. I thought you might appreciate some genuine humour?’
‘Yes, indeed. You are talking to two desperate men starved of humour, Joy.’ said Greg, ‘What have you got for us? The Corker? Bazooka? The Tosser?’
He scowled at Dave with his head slumped forward over the desk. ‘Dave …? Dave …? The Tosser? You might like that?’
Dave didn’t bother to look up.
Greg stared malevolently down at him. ‘Or … Spunky, perhaps?’
Dave still showed no signs of life. He was a lost soul.
Joy looked furtively around her and then quickly pulled a comic out from under her top. Rival comics were frowned upon in the fun factory.
‘It’s … The Corker.’
Dave suddenly came to life. ‘The Corker? Oh, that’s brilliant! Thank you, Joy! Thank you! Thank you so much!
The desperate, humour-impoverished convicts excitedly went through the precious example of real comedy together.
‘Yes. Yes. This is more like it: Scratch and Sniff,’ said Greg. ‘Love the way that cat and dog knock hell out of each other!’
‘Spat and Monocle,’ smiled Dave.
‘Knuckles Duster. Look! Look at the size of his deer pie!’
‘Cap Puccino, the crazy Italian.’
‘Wee Cheeky.’
‘This is so good,’ said Greg, happily looking up, ‘after the crap that’s been sucking our souls dry.’
‘But there’s a problem,’ responded Dave, ‘The Corker is so good, it’s actually making me feel worse.’
‘Worse …?’ asked Joy. ‘I don’t understand.’
‘Yes. It’s just rubbing it in. You may need to put me on suicide watch if I read anymore.
‘He’s already rung Cross Line six times,’ explained Greg.
From the next office they could hear Tom’s strange laugh.
‘What … What’s that neighing? Is there a horse in there?’ asked a bewildered Joy.
The sound continued, reaching a consistent tempo now. Joy listened carefully. ‘Actually, you know, it’s more like the whine of a buzz saw,’ she decided.
‘That is Tom Morecambe laughing,’ explained Dave.
‘It’s … horrible,’ winced Joy. ‘It’s so … depressing.’
‘Yes. Now you know what we’re going through, Joy,’ agreed Dave, the pain written across his face.
‘I should go,’ said Joy. Just five minutes in the room, and she could already feel the corrosive atmosphere of the fun factory eating into her very being.
‘No. Please stay,’ begged Greg.
‘Don’t go,’ implored Dave.
‘Please don’t leave us,’ they appealed in unison.
Joy heard Tom Morecambe’s buzz saw laugh again. ‘I’m sorry. I … I have to go!’ and bolted for the door.
Then she turned back and smiled at them, the relief obvious on her face that visiting time was over.
‘Keep your heads down, boys, and don’t drop the soap.’
* * *
Dave and Greg were in a bad way and then Tom came in and delivered the knock-out blow.
‘Sad news. Kenneth Royce has just died.’
Dave and Greg looked shocked.
‘At his drawing board,’ Tom added.
Both of them were huge admirers of the artist’s work. ‘I loved that strip he did for Angus, Angus and Angus about a character who sinks ships every week,’ sighed Greg.
‘Yes. Albert Ross – the Ancient Mariner,’ said Dave. ‘ “You wouldn’t want him landing on your deck.” ’
‘He was working on Ebeneezer the Tight Geezer when he died,’ said Tom.
‘He was the Rolls Royce of cartoonists,’ remembered Greg. ‘He did Billy’s Belly, a kid who had workmen living in his stomach. They looked a bit like the Tetley Tea Folk. They were always on strike, so Billy was constantly constipated.’
‘That’s right,’ agreed Dave. ‘It was like a factory inside his belly. All these workmen sitting around reading newspapers and drinking tea.’
Greg and Dave were united in their grief, their differences for now, at least, behind them.
Dave nodded at Tom. ‘He thought it was disgusting and axed it.’
‘Lavatorial humour is not required,’ said Tom primly.
‘We should remember Ken in some way,’ mused Dave. ‘Maybe a special commemorative issue of his work? With a percentage of the profits going to his widow?’
Tom was taken aback. ‘Are you on something, Dave? Apart from liquorice?’
‘I just think it would be a nice gesture. For all the faithful years of service he put in.’
Tom looked blankly at his prisoners. ‘You’re getting this out of proportion. Readers don’t even know who Ken Royce is.’
‘But they want to, Tom. And they’ll recognise his style.’
Tom replied with the absolute and immoveable authority of a prison warder. ‘We don’t want these personality cults. That’s why we never give artists credits, and we whiten out their signatures.’ He smiled to himself. ‘No matter how cleverly they hide them. I always spot them and take them out.’ He looked triumphantly at the two cons. ‘So they can’t become famous and make trouble. We’ve got to keep them in their place.’
‘He was my hero,’ said Dave.
‘We have an excellent ghost artist,’ said Tom. ‘The readers won’t notice the difference.’
‘He was one of the great cartoonists of the twentieth century,’ said Greg. ‘He was drawing black comedy at least a decade before Monty Python.’
‘Monty Python? That’s for students,’ Tom said with a dismissive hand wave. He looked annoyed. ‘Don’t care for student readers. They’re pot-smoking layabouts, marching on demos and making trouble. They shouldn’t be wasting their grant money on comics. Our money.’
Greg and Dave were unconvinced.
‘Look, you two,’ Tom said, jangling his keys, which sounded to Dave like a warder’s keys, ‘I liked Kenneth and I’m sorry to hear he’s passed away. He was a good chap. Right, Ron …?’
Ron Punch had just entered. ‘Right, Tom. Shame he dropped off his perch.’
Ron lit a cigarette as he recalled: ‘He was a good un, all right. But he didn’t know where to draw the line. He needed watching.’ He looked warningly at the two cons. ‘Like you two.’
Ron looked balefully at Greg in particular. He hadn’t forgiven him for Blitzkrieg! and they’d barely spoken since that night in the Cock Tavern.
Tom had spent far longer in debate than he cared to. Normally, he avoided confrontation and conversation and preferred to laugh everything off. His office phone rang and he used the excuse to depart.
Dave recalled his happy memories of Billy’s Belly. ‘That’s why Ken was so good – because he didn’t self-censor. There were these huge piles of baked beans Billy had eaten that come pouring down a chute into his belly…’
Greg continued the story ‘… then the foreman calls the Brain department. “Anymore to come, Brains? Or is that it?” ’
Dave carried on, ‘Brains says Billy’s eaten his fill so the foreman throws a lever for it to go into the Number Two conversion chamber. Only there’s a build up of gas, and –’
‘I know. I know.’ Ron interrupted them. ‘Billy has a massive fart that blasts all the furniture out the window. Disgusting. I was right to cancel it.’
‘Okay, it’s not your taste, Ron, but lots of kids found it really funny.’
‘That’s right,’ said Greg, fuming at Ron’s negativity.
‘Thing is,’ said Ron confidentially. ‘If readers find us really funny, they’ll want us to be really funny every week. Don’t you see, lads?’ He lowered his voice further. ‘We don’t want really funny, because then we might have a big success.’
‘What’s wrong with a big success?’ snapped Greg.
Ron continued to speak quietly. ‘Because then the board will want a big success all the time. And that’s just too much work. Steady progress is what we’re looking for.’
‘Steady progress,’ repeated Greg, rolling his eyes.
Ron saw the expression on both their faces.
‘You may sneer, boys, but mediocre is best. Stories that don’t demand too much of the reader. That is Tom Morecambe’s vision. He is a Master of the Mediocre.’
Greg was becoming more irate, endlessly clicking his pen.
‘It’s why we had to calm Kenneth down,’ Ron continued. ‘His stories were too clever by half.’
‘And clever is bad,’ muttered Dave.
‘Bad …’ agreed Greg.
‘Clever is very bad,’ agreed Ron. ‘Now, his final page of Ebeneezer the Tight Geezer was perfect. None of the indulgent stuff you ‘aficionados’ like. We went over it with a fucking magnifying glass. There was nothing offensive he was trying to sneak past us.’
‘I’m so sorry to hear that,’ said Dave glumly.
‘You finally broke him,’ said Greg.
All too often, Greg thought bitterly to himself, working class heroes, like Ken Royce, were eclipsed, ignored or crushed by the middle classes with their virtual monopoly on the media.
He’d first seen it in the sixties with his great hero: ex-pirate radio DJ Simon Dee. Dee would enter the TV studio for Dee Time to the rapturous cry of ‘It’s Siiiiiimon Dee’. At the outro of his show, 18 million viewers, including Greg and Bernie, watched enviously as Simon roared round one of the new multi-storey car parks at the wheel of an open E-type jag. The one-time labourer on a building site showed working class teenagers like Greg and Bernie they could live the dream; there was no glass ceiling.
But then Dee asked for more money and the beadle, in the form of Billy Cotton, the BBC Controller, offered him less, making him take a 20 percent pay cut as punishment. Dee ended up as a bus driver.
As Greg saw it, the glass ceiling was back in place. The lid was firmly back down on the coffin of working class dreams.
Just as the lid was firmly down on Greg’s best friend Bernie’s coffin. It wasn’t possible to leave it open, not after Bernie’s outro. Bernie, too, had leapt into an open E-type jag, only in a multi-storey car park in Ipswich. But it wasn’t his E-type. Bernie, as fashionable and debonair as the cravat-wearing Simon Dee, adored fast cars; other people’s fast cars. Unfamiliar with the controls, and the novelty of multi-storey car parks, he’d scraped it badly as he hurtled down it at high speed, trying to relive the iconic scenes in Dee Time and Get Carter. The damage alerted the cops. They recognised Bernie who was already ‘known’ to them, gave chase, and there had been that fatal crash. They Got Bernie all right.
Greg blocked the pain from his mind by exchanging it for equally passionate thoughts about Ken Royce. He prided himself on concealing his true feelings. It didn’t suit his image. Movie stars were never angry, they were cool, they were mean, they were monosyllabic, and that’s how he wanted to be. He wanted to be super-cool like Paul Newman in Cool Hand Luke or Clint Eastwood as The Man With No Name.
Hence his notebook, so he gave nothing away.
But he had to say something. ‘Satire’s not for the likes of us, guv’nor,’ Greg said in his best Alf Mast voice. ‘We needs to know our place. We should leave comedy to the toffs. Carry On films, Benny Hill and Bernard Manning are all we can understand.’
‘What’s wrong with Bernard Manning, son?’ asked Ron. ‘He’s fucking funny, that bloke. When he takes the piss out of the Paddies and the Japs, me and the Major piss ourselves laughing.’
‘Actually,’ said Dave helpfully, ‘Greg is Irish.’
‘Really?’ said Ron with no trace of embarrassment. ‘I’d never have known.’
‘How could you?’ said Dave. ‘I mean …’ and he snorted in derision, ‘What kind of Irish name is “Greg”?’
‘Lived here all my life so no accent,’ explained Greg, reaching for his notebook.
‘So it doesn’t really count, you see, Ron …’ Dave explained. ‘He’s not sensitive like the real Irish. You can come out with as many Paddy jokes as you like.’ He turned to Greg. ‘You don’t mind spud jokes, do you, Greg?’
‘They do piss me off, actually, Dave,’ Greg said quietly.
‘But you have no right to be pissed off,’ insisted Dave. ‘Because you’ve never been to Ireland.’
‘Because we can’t go back. Not to the North. Not now. My dad was in the army. He’d be seen as a traitor.’ Greg glowered at Dave. ‘You get it …? Okay?’
Dave shrugged, indifferent to other people’s woes.
‘Anyway,’ said Ron, collecting his thoughts, ‘I’ve just been to see the publisher and he wants to see you, Dave. Right now.’
‘D’you know what it’s about, Ron?’ asked Dave apprehensively. Frank Johnson, the publisher, was a man held in fear and awe, a maverick trying to change the traditional and old-fashioned nature of juvenile publishing.
‘You’d better ask him,’ replied a tight-lipped Ron.
Whatever it was, Ron didn’t look happy about it. Was it possible, speculated Dave, that someone had discovered what he was doing on The Caning Commando?
His life was already a nightmare, could things get any worse?
Serial Killer by Pat Mills & Kevin O’Neill is the first book in the Read Em And Weep series and is on sale digitally or as paperback.