The Return of the Mack ... Queen! Artwork

The Adventures of Donald McQueen, Bibliographer!

In the ancient University town of Noxford (which is definitely not Oxford), Donald McQueen is Professor Emeritus of Bibliography and a Fellow of both Timor Mortis College and Unrewley House. McQueen's adventures begin one morning when he finds the ear-trumpet of Death in the anteroom of the Fellows’ Library at his College, and discovers its miraculous power to eavesdrop upon any time or place, any reality, and to hear even the thoughts of the people and animals around him. All the while, he continues his greatest adventure, his quest to uncover the truth about the mysterious Codex Assinorum, which has caused bibliographers so many sleepless hours, and broken teeth. This is a comical adventure for bibliographers, who will complain that there is too little bibliography in it, while non-bibliographers (the benighted majority) will complain that there is too much. The first volume was completed in 2022, and the second, which will answer all those questions, and tie up all the loose ends left dangling in the first, began part-publication in July 2026.

All Episodes

The Adventures of Donald McQueen, Bibliographer!

The Return of the Mack ... Queen!

July 01, 2026 • Paul W. Nash • Season 2 • Episode 1

0:00 | 50:05

Volume II, Chapter 1: The Return of the Mack … Queen!

At last, after many years of toil and appeals from members of the bibliographical community to desist, Professor Donald McQueen of Timor Mortis College, Noxford, has completed the second volume of his infamous Adventures. This first fascicle re-introduces the Professor, his quest for the truth about the Codex Assinorum, his great rivalry with the egregious Cornelius Bunce, his love of Schickelgruber’s tomato ketchup and of a certain BBC radio series concerning haunted Scottish medical folk, and describes the delivery of the world’s smallest ransom note by a trained green woodpecker. Cherrytop the Sarcastic Horse sadly fails to put in an appearance – again! – but has promised to dance a gigue and recite a limerick in a future chapter.

Written and performed by Paul W. Nash

With special guests

Elizabeth Crowley
William Hale
Rebecca Howard
Lucy Matheson
Iona Spark
David Stumpp
Stewart Tiley

The Adventures of Donald McQueen, Bibliographer

Announcer: The adventures of Donald McQueen, bibliographer. Volume II, Chapter 1, The Return of the Mac …Queen

Donald McQueen: My name is Professor Donald McQueen, Bibliographer, and these are my adventures. To be precise, this is the beginning of the second volume of my adventures, and much has happened in the three years since the final fascicle of the first volume appeared, to much popular and critical acclaim, in the ninety-first year of the reign of Elizabeth II. I have much to tell you – of the continuing battles between the protagonists vying for the Presidency of the Bibliographical Society of London, of the Giant Rat of Sumatra (a tale for which the world is not, perhaps, quite ready), of the further crimes of the apparently-animated, indeed demonic, ventriloquist’s dummy Mr Lavender, and of the haunting of Timor Mortis College, where I am Professor Emeritus of Bibliography, by the ghosts of two disgruntled librarians, the victims, it turns out, of the serial killer who has become known as Jack the Quipper, who always leaves a little joke at the scene of his crimes – and I will get around to all those stories in due course. I regret to inform you, however, that I have still not solved the great mystery of the Codex assinorum, though I do have hopes of doing so during the course of the publication of this, the second volume of my adventures, and I do have several new, and hot, leads in my investigations.

I am writing from my study at Timor Mortis College, here in the beautiful, elephant-haunted city of Noxford. I am surrounded by my books and my research notes, and my beloved cat, Doggerel, is sleeping noisily in front of a roaring fire, though it is mid-morning and the sun is shining brightly upon the twisted and leaning spires of the city of books. Ah, Noxford. Ancient seat of learning, former centre of European biscuit manufacture, and a name associated with so many noble concepts … and products. There is, of course, Frank Stooper’s famous Noxford gingerbread, and the almost unbelievably well-known Noxford bags and Noxford brogues, a group of disgusting old slatterns, and a series of incomprehensible local accents respectively. Who has not heard of the Noxford Movement – a peculiarly unpleasant bowel condition – or the Noxford union, both a rebellious organised group of local biscuit-traders and a slang term for a Morganatic marriage? Then there is the Noxford comma, a particularly beautiful amber butterfly, not to be confused with the Noxford coma, into which many students of sociology slip during lectures ...

But enough of the city. Since I last addressed my readers I was approached by an emissary of Her Majesty, the Queen, who informed me that she dearly wished to confer upon me a knighthood, for my innumerable services to bibliography, and thereby humanity. But I was obliged to turn this honour down, on the grounds that the honorific system is essentially bankrupt, and had been rendered worthless by centuries of abuse in the service of hollow patriotism and of mammon, and that, in my opinion, Her Majesty smells of poo. I concluded by noting that the only Queen I would bend the knee to was … Quentin Crisp … and he was no longer with us. I was sorry in some ways, as ‘Professor Sir Donald McQueen’ sounded moderately well when I tried saying it, slowly, using various different accents, in front of the mirror in the toilets of the branch of Spearmint Hippo – the select club for gentlemen with more belly than horn – in Noxford’s Broadish Street before I wrote to the aforementioned emissary, enclosing a small piece of excrement (not my own, I hasten to add, but something I had collected at Spearmint Hippo). That was, of course, before Her Majesty passed away, to be replaced upon the throne by a likeable clown she once brought home from Covent Garden, where he had been performing in an humorous sketch-troupe, undertaking a parody of the musical ensemble known as the Village People, and had not been able to shake off in forty years. King Coco, as he is now, also wrote to me, via an actuary, to return the fragment of excrement I had sent to his late adopted mother, and to beg me to reconsider my position and kneel before the throne to accept that ancient chivalric title. But I was firm, and wrote upon the slightly malodorous, crested and gilded envelope “Return to sender”.

The completion of the part-publication of the first volume of these my Adventures has been met, as I have said, with considerable critical acclaim. The London Review of Adventures described as ‘just the sort of thing our readers would like, I should think’, while The Philistine Literary Supplement called it ‘the greatest contribution to the nervous wellbeing of the nation since the invention of Mogadon’, which was a great compliment as Mogadon was invented by the family of The Philistine’s owner, sir Rex Dastardly, a bloated Australian codliver-oil magnate. On the other hand, The Monitor (the leading organ for lizards and other reptiles) described it as ‘childish twaddle’. These reviews naturally had no effect upon sales of the great work, which has flown from the shelves of booksellers, real and virtual, in vast numbers, and been delivered across the world by all those one-breasted warrior-women who seem to have found employment in that sphere. Then there has been the highly successful moving picture adaptation of the first volume of my adventures, upon which subject I shall say more anon.

As a result, I am now both rich and famous, and rich, and have had to turn down several other dubious invitations, in addition to that from the Palace. I was asked to endorse Wormwood’s Mustard – advertised as the hottest, reddest mustard on the market, the very bastard of mustards, the great bustard of mustards, the last and best bastion of mustardness, the rusty master of mustards, and, for some reason, the Rear Admiral of mustards – but, although their representatives clustered round me, jostled and bristled as they thrust gold into my truss, wheedled and at last grew flustered and blustered – I told them that, much as I enjoyed their mustard, I must remain true to the greatest condiment the world has ever known, Schickelgruber’s tomato ketchup, the only ketchup which can make a rotting rat taste good.

I do wonder if their current advertising campaign quite hits the mark … Other invitations I have been obliged to turn down came from Dame Lucy Worsley (that was an unexpected offer of concubinage), the Royal Society for Raising Money for Itself (which invited me to become a Fellow at the cost of £3,900 per annum), the Friendly Bomb Company of Norwich (which invited me to become the face of its cluster-bombs, before a planned deployment at Slough) and something called Strictly Come Dancing, which turned out to be a television programme. At the age of seventy-four, I would have been the oldest contestant yet. But I watched the programme, for the first time, and was so struck by the inhumanity and asininity of the proceedings that I howled like a dog, and my neighbour, in the next suite of rooms at Timor Mortis, Professor of Mixology Maximillian Fox, ran in to check that I was not spontaneously combusting. My beloved cat, Doggerel, who was resting in my lap at the time, was sick, no doubt as a direct result of watching Strictly Come Dancing …

But I am troubled by my fame, and the notoriety of the first volume of my memoir, not so much for the reactions of the swinish multitude and the vast machine of international commerce, nor for the ill-reflection which such fame may cast upon the gravity of my research, and my status as the nation’s, and perhaps the world’s, leading living bibliographer – although I am naturally concerned about that – but because every one of the millions who have read my book, or witnessed the movie based upon it, now knows that I possess The Ear Trumpet of Death. The reader will recall, I am sure, how I found this worn but beautiful auditory-aid on the steps of the library of Timor Mortis College at the very start of the first fascicle of my adventures. Indeed the finding, and use, of the trumpet, was the occasion for my beginning the publication of the work you are now holding in your hands (or watching on the silver screen if Mr Steven Steepleburke, or whatever his name is, decides to shoot the Adventures of Donald McQueen, Bibliographer, II). I have found that a good many people who have read the story do not believe the ear-trumpet to exist, but consider it a mere literary device, or an imaginative invention, and I should perhaps encourage that view. But honesty, veracity, decency, integrity, accuracy, sincerity and modesty – known as the ‘Seven Pillars of Bibliography’, and therefore of Life – oblige me to state that the trumpet is real, and is here in the side-pocket of my bibliographer’s smock, as I write these words. I am concerned lest someone should try to steal the Ear-trumpet of Death from me – and indeed there have already been two attempts. Last year, shortly after the appearance of the last fascicle of my adventures, I was accosted on the street outside the College by an urchin …

Urchin: Beggin’ your pardon, sir, but would you be willing to view a simple collational formula which my ‘umble hand has, I am sure, very carelessly drafted?

DM: What was that you said?

Urchin: Please, sir, correct me collational formula. It’s here on this scrap of creased and soiled paper …

DM: The urchin removed a folded scrap of creased and soiled paper from a ragged pocket in his creased and soiled trousers, and held it out towards me with an imploring look … What are you about, young fellow?

Urchin: Well, your lordship, I asks meself, what a rich and handsome gentleman like yourself might want from a pitiful and worthless scrap of humanity like me, and I answers meself thuswise, that, being so benevolent and elegant of appearance, with your silky beard and smock and all, all you might want is a sexual favour, which I, being a product of the me-too generation is disinclined to grant, so failin’ that I thinks to meself, well what does such a kind-hearted and well-set-up gentleman want if he does not want, or is not going to get, a knee-trembler or a pot-swizzler, and I answers myself that he likes nothing better than to correct the bibliographical failings of others, and might be willing to pay just a few pennies for the pleasure. So, sir, for one English pound I will give you this scrap of paper, and for another English pound I will let you correct the collational formula which I have, no doubt highly inaccurately, scribbled upon it … Or, if you prefer sir, I will give you, for a shiny English pound, this scrap of creased and soiled paper …

DM: The urchin fished around in his pocket and withdrew a second folded scrap of paper, which he held out in the other hand.

Urchin: Which bears the, no doubt profoundly flawed, quasi-facsimile transcription of the title-page of a copy of Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan of 1651 which, in the ‘umble opinion of this urchin, exists in three distinct editions, only one of which can genuinely be dated to that year.

DM: At this, my eyes naturally lit up. What bibliographer worth his salt would not be tempted by such an offer. But I remained cautious … I would like to correct your nascent bibliographical efforts, young urchin, but first I should perhaps correct your use of the term ‘collational’. That is, I am afraid, an ugly Americanism, coined by that barely-literate hornswaggler Professor Harrison D. Flowers, of Mons Veneris University, California, and carelessly adopted by some gullible European bibliographers. There is no need to coin a bogus adjective from the noun ‘collation’, since that noun can quite legitimately be used in an adjectival sense. So it is correct to refer not to a ‘collational formula’ but to a ‘collation formula’.

Urchin: I am most exceedingly grateful to your lordship for this excellent advice. I will henceforth always use the term ‘collation formula’ and may the devil tear out me tongue and whip away all me internal organs if the word ‘collational’ ever passes me lips again, sir … except of course in the context of explaining that the word should never be used. And I will not point out never, and to no one, sir, that the term was first used not by Harrison Flowers in the Americas but by Sir Willy Winkie Grudge in the holy smoke of Cambridge, and was adopted by such luminaries as Philippa Gasbag and even Michael Ribwright …

DM: Michael Ribwright would never use the word ‘collational’ … I was beginning to suspect that this urchin might know something about bibliography, and might even know that I was an Emeritus Professor of that subject. It seemed a little unlikely that he had been hanging about in one of the streets of Noxford’s immense University plexus in the hope of gaining a few pounds by this means from any old professor who happened to emerge from a college.

Urchin: So please, your honour, do look at my … collation formula, or my quasi-facsimile transcription, or both, and give me a few pounds for the pleasure of correctin’ me innocent and misguided ways …

DM: It was at that moment that I felt a stirring in the side-pocket of my bibliographer’s smock, and looked down to see a plump and furry paw thrust therein. I looked up from the paw, and there was a womble, with the shiftiest look upon his long face that I have ever seen. He was after the Ear-Trumpet of Death. Wombles are normally the most honest and industrious of creatures, but when a womble goes bad he is the first among criminals. When a womble goes underground, as well as overground, and wombling free of apprehension by the police, who seem incapable of catching the furry miscreants, they are not so much making good use of the things that they find, things that the everyday folk leave behind, as robbing those everyday folk of the things they still possess, and making evil use of the things that they have stolen. People just don’t notice them, they never see, under their noses a womble may be. They pilfer by night, and they pilfer by day, looking for treasure to spirit away.

I had heard tales of a gang of recidivist wombles who were working the streets of Noxford, in collaboration with a group of young human pickpockets, under the direction of Father Abraham, who had formerly been the gang-leader for that most despicable of species, the smurfs! These wombles were organized. They worked as a team. These wombles were villains. These wombles were mean. And one of them was after my trumpet. Although he had not yet managed to get his paws upon it I raised at once a cry of ‘stop thief!’

Urchin: We’ve been rumbled. Quick, leg-it lads!

DM: So saying the urchin legged-it, and so did the shifty-looking womble, along with several other urchins, and wombles, which I now perceived disguised as construction-workers, motorcycle cops, marines, gay bikers, cowboys and red Indians, in the crowd.

That was the first attempt to steal my precious trumpet. The second was a more subtle affair, involving, I am sorry to say, my beloved pussy-cat, Doggerel. One beautiful Spring day, some two years after the first volume of my Adventures had been completed, my diary tells me it was the 23rd of May in the year 2023, I returned from giving a lecture to the Noxford Bibliographical Society – a local shadow of the Bibliographical Society of London, largely peopled by pinheads and muppets, but with a genuine interest in that gay science – a lecture on the state of my research into the mystery of the Codex Assinorum, in which I naturally kept back the best of my findings and conclusions for my imminent and transformational monograph – to find my beloved companion absent. At first I hardly noticed. Although he often rushes to greet me when I enter my rooms at Timor Mortis, he is sometimes elsewhere, hunting mice or sparrows, or attending the Spanish class which he takes every Wednesday evening. He also sings sometimes in the college chapel choir, so his absence went unremarked, as I sat down to peruse the latest volume of the National Organ of the Bibliographic Society, usually known by its popular acronym of NO BS, the American equivalent of the Journal of the Bibliographical Society of London, and almost as good. Interestingly, the acronym could also be read as NOBS, but is only ever so read by the mischievous and facetious, and all mature individuals refer to the journal as NO BS. And NOBS, of course, has another meaning here in this city of learning, standing for the Noxford Operatic and Balletic Society, of which my brother Starwheel is a leading light.

That night, when Doggerel failed to appear for his tray of sparrow giblets, I began to worry in earnest, and when he had not returned by the morning my brow was deeply furrowed. Could he have been shut in the cheese-cellar by accident – he does have a weakness for soft cheeses – or could he perhaps have been struck by one of the hansom cabs and four-wheelers which ply up and down Noxford’s Broadish Street at all hours. But no, he was too canny an old alley-cat to have succumbed to any such accident. I was considering reporting his loss to the college authorities and the police, when I heard an urgent tapping at my casement. I crossed to the window and was surprised to see, standing on the sill, a woodpecker. And not a rare lesser-spotted or a common greater-spotted woodpecker, but the middling-rare and somewhat larger green variety. I opened the window, knocking the bird from his perch in a comical manner. The woodpecker laughed – green woodpeckers are renowned for their sense of humour – recovered himself, and flew in at the window, alighting on my breakfast table where he began to peck furiously at the oak surface. After a moment I perceived, tied to his right leg, a small cylinder of some shiny metal. The woodpecker raised his leg, allowing me to untie the cord which held the cylinder in place, and I unscrewed the end and drew out and unrolled the smallest ransom-note I had ever seen. It was only five by three centimetres in size, and had been manufactured in the traditional way, by cutting out characters from some printed source, and pasting them onto a piece of paper to form a message. The source chosen was not some newspaper headline or magazine advertisement, but, I discovered when I looked at the note through my glass, a text-page of the Journal of the Bibliographical Society of London. It must have been immensely fiddly to cut out and paste down all those characters on so small a scale, but I supposed it had been necessary in order to make a note small enough to fit into the carrier-woodpecker’s leg-receptacle. The text was, disgracefully, all in capitals and read in the following way:

MCQUEEN. I HAVE YOUR CAT. YOU WILL DELIVER THE EAR TRUMPET OF DEATH TO ME – I was surprised to find that my voice reverberated sinisterly even when reading these words from a ransom-note – BY LEAVING IT IN THE HORN OF THE STATUE OF SOOTY OUTSIDE THE BIBBLYBOBBLEIAN BY TEATIME TOMORROW. I WILL THEN RETURN YOUR CAT. Signed A FRIEND.

P.S. IF YOU FAIL, OR CALL THE COPS, AS I MIGHT EXPECT FROM SOMEONE SO FOOLISH AS NOT TO UNDERSTAND THAT VELLUM AND PARCHMENT ARE, ESSENTIALLY, THE SAME MATERIAL, I WILL HAVE DOGGEREL STUFFED.

I was naturally appalled and discomfited by this turn of events and considered giving up the trumpet. The statue of Sooty outside the Bibblybobbleian is, of course, a well-known landmark in the city. It depicts in marble the once-loved alumnus of Black Knobbler College holding high a horn of plenty, from which the plenty was sadly stolen some years ago, leaving the horn empty. Sooty has now, of course, been disgraced and, since his involvement in both the arms-trade and the promotion of equity release has been made public, there have been moves to have all the carvings and portraits of the silent bear removed from Noxford. Sooty himself was found guilty of firearms offences and war crimes at Noxford assizes in 2016 and condemned to thirty years penal servitude. At the trial he refused to speak, but whispered into the ear of his counsel on several occasions, and at one point took out a small magic-wand which he waved, to cries of ‘Izzy wizzy, let’s get busy’ from the gallery, to no apparently effect. When the judge passed sentence, the criminal was seen to take out a small pistol – how he had managed to smuggle such a thing into the building is still a matter for conjecture – which he levelled at His Honour Justice Pickering, causing panic in the court-room. It turned out to be a water-pistol, with which he attempted to soak His Honour, but the failing power in his little paws, and the small size of the weapon, resulted in a feeble spurt, which reached less than half-way towards the throne of justice. Sooty was taken away in chains, but served little of sentence as he was murdered in his cell the following year … apparently by Kermit the frog. The statue at the Bibblybobbleian has been the focus of several protests, and students have more than once tried to topple it, so far without success. The new and enlightened Protobibliotecarius of the Library has promised to remove the statue as soon as he can raise the funds, and replace it with a marble representation of Sooty’s late brother Sweep, formerly believed to be a rogue criminal among the Corbett family, but now rehabilitated … or possibly of Ramsbottom, the Yorkshire serpent, who later founded a charity to help and support Sooty’s victims.

I pictured myself wrapping the ear-trumpet in a green velvet cloth and placing it in the empty horn of Sooty. I would have gladly given up the precious object to save Doggerel, but then I bridled at the awful cheek of the kidnapper, and noticed two factors which immediately suggested the name of the despicable individual involved. That ignorant jibe about vellum and parchment … I had heard that before. And did I know a reader of the Journal of the Bibliographical Society of London who both viewed that publication with so little respect that he would cut it up for his own ends, and was known to be a woodpecker-trainer? I did. I recognized this outrage as the work of Cornelius Bunce. Bunce … Bunce … Bunce! My arch enemy and the worst bibliographer in the world, the organizer of half that is evil and nearly all that is undetected in the city of books, the Napoleon of Bibliographical Crime!

This was, of course, before Bunce published his monograph on the dung-pellets of Patagonia and Australasia, and I perceived at once that he hoped to use the ear-trumpet to take a short-cut or two in his research, as well as for who knows what other foul ends. And he had the effrontery to catnap my beloved feline, and threaten me with his stuffage! I would not allow it. So I at once reported the crimes of blackmail and catnapping to the police, and together we staked-out the statue of Sooty that Thurdsay evening, having placed a Cornish pasty wrapped in green velvet in the empty horn of the statue. But, to my disappointment, Bunce did not come to retrieve his prize himself, but sent instead his manservant, an Andaman Island pigmy known as Little Dave Wilkins. He did rather stand out in the quadrangle of the Bibblybobbleian, being the only tiny black man, naked save for a skirt woven of human hair and a colourful embroidered sash, with a crown of dyed parakeet’s feathers on his head, short dreadlocks decorated with small bones, and carrying a spear, that the quadrangle had seen that day. Sadly he was too short to reach the horn of the statue, even when standing on its plinth, and had to appeal for help to a passer-by. That passer-by was me, heavily disguised, with a false black beard covering my real white beard. I put on an Irish accent …

[Welsh accent] Why, little fellow, would you like me to lift you up to that horn?

Dave Wilkins: Yes, thank you, sir!

I grabbed Dave Wilkins by the waist and raised him until he could almost reach the green-velvet-wrapped pasty in the horn, then whisked him down to the ground and retained a firm grip upon him, by the loin-cloth, which he was wearing beneath his skirt.

‘Ah ha!’ I cried out ‘I have you now, you little turd!’

DW: I am no turd, sir, but only the unwilling creature of an evil master!

DM: At this moment the two constables who had been hidden in the crowd which usually throngs the quadrangle, made themselves known. But Dave Wilkins was too quick for them. He squirmed out of his loin-cloth, poked me in the ribs with his spear (which was thankfully artificial, so did no damage) and ran with remarkable speed and agility between the legs of one of the constables and out of the quadrangle. Both policemen did a double-take, then looked at one another, then did another double-take, then ran after Dave Wilkins with their truncheons out. I also gave chase, but although a remarkable physical specimen, my seventy-four years told on me, and I was scarcely able to keep up with the fleeing pygmy and officers of the law. They ran into Broadish Street, past Timor Mortis and Brazeknob colleges, turned into the Hashmarket and sped thence into the High Street (which is naturally the next thoroughfare after the Hashmarket), past Mons Veneris and Lady Garden, Saint Lancelot and Clarkson. Here it seemed the pursuers had lost their quarry. I saw the constables stop and look at one another again, and then do a triple-take, before they evidently caught sight of Wilkins and renewed their pursuit. We all three continued our headlong course along High Street and into Unlikely Lane, which is a narrow passage leading to the cobbled Knobbler Street, where several colleges stand in a line, like buses awaiting the arrival of a ticket-inspector. We passed Merkin College and Black Knobbler (which gives the street its name) and the last I saw of Dave Wilkins was his tiny, black and feather-crested figure diving through the catflap in the great double-doors of St Ivel College. The policemen could not follow, though one of them tried, but could only get his head through the flap before he became stuck. The doors were firmly locked, it being after curfew although it was barely later than teatime, so by the time the sleepy custodian had been roused from his box by the ringing of the doorbell, and had come down to see what all the fuss was about, Little Dave Wilkins had vanished.

A thorough search of the college was made, but of the Andaman Islander, or his wicked one-legged master, there was no sign. A small gap was found in the wall of the kitchen garden, where there was a smudge of blood on the brickwork, and a discarded parakeet feather, dyed bright red, lay upon the pavement just outside, so it was assumed that the miscreant had escaped that way. It was no co-incidence, I am sure, that Dave Wilkins chose to run to St Ivel College, for that is now the home of his master, the egregious Professor Cornelius Bunce. Bunce, Bunce, Bunce … my exact contemporary at Noxford and for the past fifty years, and more, my bitter rival at St Ivel, or St Evil as it is sometimes known. Bunce played the innocent, but the police knew well enough that he was behind the catnapping. But without Wilkins and, ideally, his confession, they could take the matter no further, despite my pointing out the obvious connections between Bunce and Wilkins, and the fact that the ransom note had been delivered by a green woodpecker. Among Bunce’s few, and curious, talents is the training of wild animals to do his bidding, a power which he claims to have been taught by Wilkins, and which he exercises particularly over mountain gorillas, elephants and woodpeckers, especially green woodpeckers. But, the investigating officer, Chief Inspector Nick Buckle of Plumb Valley Police, determined that this was too tenuous a link to make a case against Bunce, although he conceded that the Professor was probably the mastermind of the enterprise … From that moment forth, of course, Little Dave Wilkins was a wanted man, and the police of four counties (Noxfordshire, Bikeshire, Ducklinghamshire and, for some reason, Cornhole) sought him with vigour. It was a brief hunt, however, for his body was found three days later, stuffed into a canvas kitbag and thrown into the River Plumb, weighted down with carelessly-forged currency (there were more than seventy three-and-half-pound coins) … He had been stabbed with a butter-knife. I thought at first that Bunce must have done the deed himself, to silence his erstwhile manservant. But then rumours fluttered about Noxford that Wilkins had been seen and heard having a loud altercation in Tedious Passage on the night before his body was found, with a man even smaller than himself, a dwarf wearing a violet-coloured jacket and no trousers. So perhaps he had been murdered by Mr Lavender, generally held to be a psychotic animated ventriloquist’s dummy (although I find it hard to believe this is the case, and suspect that an evil dwarf is impersonating Mr Lavender in order to commit crimes in his name) … What a lot of murderers there seem to be in Noxford just at the moment.

I was, at this stage, still tremendously worried about Doggerel, of course, and feared that Bunce would carry out his threat to have him stuffed. I fretted in my college room for twenty-four hours after the disappearance of Dave Wilkins, fearing the rat-tat-tat of another woodpecker, with a new ultimatum. But none came, and an idea occurred to me. Perhaps I could use the Ear Trumpet of Death to determine the whereabouts of my beloved companion. I took it out from its hiding place – since recent events I had taken to storing it in … well, I had better not give the location away to the readers of this chapter of my adventures … and always now carried it, when I carried it, in the front pocket, rather than the side-pocket, of my bibliographer’s smock – and, fitting it to my earhole, bent my mind upon the furry features and vicious teeth and claws of that feline celebrity.

But once more I failed. Instead of finding myself approaching the prison of my companion, I began to pick up radio-waves from the recent past. While I may have remarked that The Archers family is the worst programme on the wireless, I now found myself listening to its antithesis, the best of programmes …

Announcer: And now on BBC Radio Noxford, Dr Thinley’s Casebook, the everyday story of haunted Scottish medical folk.

Stiff announcer: Dr Thinley’s casebook. With Andrew Crookback as Dr Cameron, Barbara Sullen as Janet, and Bill Simpleton as Dr Thinley. This week ‘The Tannochbrae Horror’, written by Smudgminda Poe and adapted for the wireless by Hamish Thistlecock.

Janet: Oh Dr Cameron, I do miss Dr Thinley.

Cameron: Aye Janet, the place is just not the same without him.

Thinley: I am right here, you stupid woman. Can you no see me?

J: Sometimes, you know, I think I catch sight of him, out of the corner of my eye. But I turn to look, and it is only the curtain waving in the breeze, or some porridge rising up out of a bowl and forming itself into a manlike shape, as it so often does, or the vicar, or that old man covered in hair who lives next door coming round to borrow a cup of sugar, or that mad woman from the Post Office having escaped her straight jacket, or a pair of dogs walking round, one on the shoulders of the other, in a beige overcoat, or a moose in a snood which has somehow wandered into the house, or a gaggle of geese forming an acrobatic pyramid in the front garden, or an escaped Pope fleeing from the Calvinists, or …

C: [interrupting] Aye, Janet, grief can have terrible consequences for a weak-minded woman like yourself. But these sightings of Dr Thinley are only in your imagination, woman. The man is dead and buried, and there is no such things as ghosts. Tell yourself that, Janet, next time you see a Pope or some porridge and mistake it for our erstwhile friend.

J: You are no doubt right, Dr Cameron.

T: Obviously the two of them could not see me. But I saw them well enough, and heard them too as they discussed my curious demise.

J: Was that not a curious demise which Dr Thinley suffered Dr Cameron?

C: Aye it was that, Janet. Who would have thought a young … ish man like Thinley would have succumbed to the Atlantean Flu and fallen off his bike in a state of delirium over the edge of the cliff into the sea …

J: Do you mean the Atlantic Flu?

C: No Janet, I mean the Atlantean flu. It did not come from the Atlantic, but from the lost city of Atlantis which, as you know, lies just under the ocean a little to the north of the cove of Tannochbrae. It seems he found a curious green glass bottle on the beach, and opened it to find it contained Atlantean ale, which he quaffed, swallowing down the flu bacteria which made him giddy, and caused him to lose control of his bicycle.

T: That’s not how it happened at all, Dr Cameron. I found that bottle right enough, but it was empty, and I was pushed from my bike as I rode home that evening, by the hands of a man you know all too well … And then there’s the strange tale of what happened to me under the ocean, with a mermaid and the King of the Sea …

J: But enough of this chatter Dr Cameron, no doubt there are patients for you in the waiting-room now. I know Mrs McLevy has been there since 1922, and young Alistair McGowan has been holding his severed ear in place since last Thursday …

C: You’re right Janet. I must get to work. There’s much to do, and the task will be all the greater, and harder, until we can find a replacement for Dr Thinley.

T: So I followed Cameron through to the surgery at Arden House and stood behind him as he met his patients that morning. It was mostly quotidian medical work. Mrs McLevy had apparently died and been re-incarnated as a tortoise while she had been waiting – or perhaps her body had simply rotted to dust and blown away in the breeze and a random tortoise had wandered in and taken up her chair – but in any case the patient was now a tortoise and so Cameron whisked it off to Mr Yellowley the veterinarian. Young McGowan’s ear had been held so long against the wound in the side of his head that it had re-attached itself of its own accord, and no stitches were necessary. Nancy McFancy’s preganancy was proceeding adequately, and old Mr McFuttle was in with his usual complaint, which was quickly dealt with by Cameron with a hot towel and three mildly racist jokes. There were the usual faintly absurd, amusing and alliterative, rhyming or anagramatical ailments. Peggy Whipple had a peg stuck on her nipple. Fergus Douglas had a humungous fungus on his tragus while his sister Inge had a blister on her finger. Miles and Dennis Rawles both had piles like tennis balls. His mother had brought wee Jimmy Ure in for penile incontinence. Christie Crick had a crusty crack, and Alan Fisher an anal fistula. Ritchie Pollock had an itchy bollock – just the one, naturally – while Rory Loeb had a saw earlobe. Maggie Rammage and Aggie Shand had each caused damage to the other’s hand, neither of us could quite work out how. Jock McGoolie was prescribed a new truss. Fanny Burns reported some slight genital inflammation, while Willie Green had a more serious problem. Old Dan McGough had a cold and a cough, as did Mary-Anne Irving (which was fairly unnerving). Neither Dick Fell nor John Thomas Doolittle could get it up, while Everard Kinghorn and Hardy Woodyard couldn’t bring it down. Walter McGee had water on the knee. Walter McBain had water on the brain, while his brother, Sexton McBain, had sex on the brain. And so forth … But the next patient was new to me …

C: Do sit down, sir, and tell me your name and what ails you.

T: A youngish man had entered the surgery. Tall and lean, and dressed in workman’s clothes, his face was unshaven and his eyes shone like two bright pennies on either side of his hawk-like nose … I don’t mean that his nose was shaped like a hawk – that would be absurd – rather it was shaped like a hawk’s nose. The stranger spoke.

Archie: I am Archie Slender.

C: That’s a rough throat you have Mr Slender. Do you know what is wrong with you?

A: Yes, demonic possession.

C: Really? So … you think you’re possessed by a demon do you? That’s more a case for the Kirk than for Arden House, I am thinking.

A: I went to see the Reverend McPortillo and he would not believe that I was possessed, and told me to come to you for a diagnosis.

C: I too do not believe in demonic possession Mr Slender …

T: You don’t believe in bloody ghosts either, but I am here right enough.

A: I tell you, I am mastered by an emissary of hell, who has taken over my body and mind and forces me to perform vile and unspeakable acts of sexual depravity …

C: And with whom have you been performing these vile and unspeakable acts?

A: With Janet MacPherson, your house-keeper.

C: I think you’re mistaken, Mr Slender. If you and Janet have been performing depraved sexual acts I am quite sure it was at her instigation, and was nothing to do with any diabolical influence. She does love all that kind of thing …

A: Be that as it may, I am possessed.

C: Well something is certainly affecting your accent. It’s all over the place! Perhaps I will take a wee peep at your throat all the same, to see if I cannot find an earthly cause for your hoarseness. Now open up Mr Slender and show me your tonsils.

T: Cameron stumbled awkwardly around his desk and peered into Mr Slender’s open mouth. At this moment something quite extraordinary happened. Slender’s jaws, which were wide open, opened wider still until they seemed impossibly wide apart, his mouth seeming to present a hole as large as the rest of his face. Cameron goggled and opened his mouth, and at that moment a creature … I suppose a demon … appeared in Slender’s massive gob and leapt into Cameron’s forcing it open in his flight. Cameron swallowed, and the creature was gone. There was a long silence … which I will abbreviate for the listener’s convenience. It had happened so quickly, and so oddly, that for a moment I doubted my own sanity (although I am dead, and a ghost, and I am not sure a ghost can become a loony if the living person they had been was sane – it is an interesting point, to which I may return at a later date). The creature was not quite what you might expect from the word ‘demon’. It was not red or fiery, but grey and glistening with fluid, and its form was more like that of an … octopus or squid than a devil, and yet it moved like a tiny man, running on two of its grey limbs out of Slender’s throat and leaping, with its tentacles spinning, into Cameron’s mouth … A series of expressions passed across my old friend’s face. First there was surprise, then disgust, then surprise again, then a kind of calm resignation, then joy, then imbecility, then he looked suddenly Chinese, then fearful, then loving, and then he grinned and his face settled back into something approaching its common expression.

So this was it. Demonic possession was real, and my old friend, Dr Angus Cameron of Arden House, was now the residence of an evil spirit … After a long while he spoke, and he seemed to be the same man he had been a few minutes earlier. Why had Archie Slender sounded so different when he had been possessed?

C: Well, Mr Slender, your throat is certainly inflamed. Would you mind telling me what work you do? Are you perhaps employed in the asbestos-works at Cockie Muckie or the strontium biscuit factory on the banks of the Weedle? … Mr Slender … Mr Slender …

T: He reached out a hand towards his patient, and gently shook him. But there was no movement or sound from Slender. His mouth was still open, not quite so wide as it had been, but his eyes were glazed and his body rigid. It was clear that the man was dead.

Stiff announcer: You have been listening to ‘The Tanochbrae Horror’, an episode of Dr Thinley’s Casebook. The cast was as follows: Dr Cameron, Andrew Crookback … Janet, Barbara Sullen … Dr Thinley, Bill Simpleton … Archie Slender, Alexander Horsethief. The play was produced by Pottie Winkles.

DM: Interesting, indeed moving, as that episode of the Casebook had been, and much as I burned to know what happened in the next episode, this approach was getting me nowhere. The reader may remember that I was recalling an incident in which my beloved cat Doggerel had been kidnapped by the unspeakable Cornelius Bunce … Bunce, Bunce … and I was attempting to rescue him … I decided to try another approach … And what that approach was, will have to wait until the next chapter of these, the adventures of Donald McQueen, bibliographer.

Announcer: That was The adventures of Donald McQueen, Bibliographer. Today’s chapter was sponsored by the Bibliographical Society of London, and by Schicklegruber’s tomato ketchup, the only condiment that can make a rotting rat taste good. It was written and performed by Paul W. Nash with special guests Elizabeth Crowley, William Hale, Rebecca Howard, Lucy Matheson, Iona Spark, David Stumpp and Stewart Tiley. The music ‘borrowed’ themes from Trevor Duncan and Malcolm Lockyer.

Next time in The Adventures of Donald McQueen, Bibliographer.

Haughty voice: New, from the engineers at Power Gears, we present The Mechanical Navvy.

Display your wisdom, purchase one

Display your business savvy

Your life of ease will have begun