The Digested Twenty-first Century

by John Crace

  ‘You are coming with me to face justice in the land of the brave and the home of the free,’ he snarled.

  It was September 9 2001.

  * * *

  ‘Project Peregrine is dead in the water,’ said Deveraux. ‘Ten more days and Bin Laden would have been ours. But just who did tip off Avenger?’

  McBride smiled to himself, the outline of a badger tattoo just visible through his shirt.

  It was September 10, 2001.

  Digested read, digested: This year’s winner of the Jeffrey Archer prize for creative writing.

  The Da Vinci Code

  by Dan Brown (2003)

  Renowned curator Jacques Sauniere shuddered. The first page of a Dan Brown potboiler was no place for any character. ‘Count yourself lucky,’ growled Silas the monk, as he chastised himself with his chalice. ‘I’ve got to hang around for another 400 pages of this grabage.’

  The phone rand in Robert Langdon’s hotel room. After his previous adventure with the Pope, nothing should have surprised him. But he was surprised. ‘I am surprised to be summoned to the Louvre in the dead of night,’ he said to himself.

  Inspector Bezu Fache was a sangry as his name suggested. ‘I don’t like it when the renowned curator of the Louvre is found dead in the gallery at the dead of night in suspicious circumstances,’ he muttered. ‘So Monsieur Langdon. What do you make of Paris?’

  ‘It is a very beautiful city, steeped in art and religion,’ replied Langdon earnestly. ‘And if I’m not very much mistaken, the pose monsieur Sauniere has adopted in death is highly symbolic.’

  ‘Not so fast,’ said a young woman, who identified herself as Sophie Neveu, an agent of the French cryptology department. ‘You have a phone call’. She took him aside to the toilets. ‘Inspector Fache suspects you of the nurders,’ she whispered. ‘You must run away with me, for I am Jacques Sauniere’s grand-daughter.’

  ‘Not before I have solved the riddle your grandfather left.’

  13-3-2-21-1-1-8-5

  O Draconian devil!

  Oh, Lame saint!

  ‘Hmm, the numbers are the Fibonacci sequence,’ squeaked Sophie.

  ‘And the words are an anagram of Leonardo da Vinci and A Load of Hokum’.

  They rushed to the world famous painting, known as the Mona Lisa. There they found another clue.

  ‘It’s another anagram,’ yelled Langdon. ‘Madonna of the Rocks’. They rushed to the world famous painting, known as the Madonna of the Rocks. There they found a key, only narrowly evading the combined forces of the Parisien gendarmeries.

  ‘That was close,’ squealed Sophie.

  ‘Thank goodness we have a 20 page car ride to our next destination so I can indulge in some more bogus art history.’

  Sophie struggled to stay awake as Langson droned on about Leonardo, the Feminine and the Priory of Sion.

  ‘Wasn’t all this bollocks in The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail?’ she asked.

  ‘Yes, but the Yanks will have forgotten all about it,’ Langdon replied.

  ‘They arrived outside the private Swiss Bbank, ‘You will need a combination as well as a key.’

  ‘It must be the Fibonacci sequence,’ Sophie shouted, as they collected the keystone to the Grail while barrowly evading the combined forced of the Parisien gendarmerie.

  ‘We must take a long car journey to the home of Sir Leigh Teabing, the eccentric crippled Grail expert who lives in France,’ said Langdon, ‘as this will allow me to fill you in on some more bogus art history. Did you know Jesus married Mary Magdalene and your grandfather was the Grand Master of the priory of Sion and you are a direct descendant of Jesus?’

  ‘And you sentence construction is pitiful,’ she laughed.

  ‘Aha!’ said Sir Leigh, heaving his crippled leg across the room. ‘We have no time to lose if we are to unlock the riddle of the keystone. We must fly to England.’

  The private jet arrived at Biggin Hill, narrowly evading the combined forces of the Parisien gendarmerie. Langdon used the atbash cipher and turned the keystone to S-O-F-I-A. It unlocked to reveal yet another riddle.

  In London lies a knight a pope interred

  They rushed to the Temple church. ‘This is a dead end,’ said Langdon as Silas and Sir Leigh’s manservant appeared. ‘Help! He’s been taken hostage,’ cried Sophie.

  Langdon fretted over the riddle. He was in the wrong place. He rushed to Sir Isaac newton’s tomb in Westminster Abbey. There was Sir Leigh.

  ‘I was the baddy all along,’ sneered Sir Leigh. ‘The Priory of Sion weren’t going to release the secrets of the Grail so I persuaded Opus dei to kill Sauniere. Now I’ve killed Silas and the manservant and I want the cryptex.’

  Bezu fache burst in and arrested Sir Leigh. ‘I aplogise,’ he said to langdon. ‘You weren’t the killer after all.’

  Langdon and Sophie took the train to Rosslyn in Scotland, near England. ‘Will we find the grail here?’ asked Sophie.

  ‘No,’ said an old woman who happened to be Sophie’s granny.

  Langdon shivered as he kissed the direct descendant of Jesus for the first time. Sophie smiled. Maybe she would see him again. Langdon headed to Paris to start digging in the vaults under the Louvre. There he knelt before the bones of Mary Magdalene. ‘You took your time,’ Mary smiled, before ascending into heaven.

  Digested read, digested: Millions of readers can be wrong.

  State of Fear

  by Michael Crichton (2004)

  A scientist dies in Paris after having sex with a mysterious stranger. A supplier of mining equipment is also killed in Canada. Nobody – least of all the reader – pays any attention. Except Kenner, the MIT-educated, special-forces-trained lone wolf.

  ‘Hmm,’ he smiled grimly to himself. ‘The environmental activists are on the move.’

  Back in California, Nick Drake, head of the National Environmental Resource Fund (Nerf), was sharing his thoughts with George Morton, his tycoon backer.

  ‘It’s really heavy,’ said Drake. ‘The water level of the Pacific has risen so much that these islands are going to be swept away. We need money to sue the multi-nationals for global warming.’

  ‘You got it,’ replied Morton. ‘I love this planet.’

  Peter Evans, Morton’s attorney, and Sarah, Morton’s impossibly beautiful PA, nodded in agreement. ‘We love this planet.’

  Two weeks later, Morton appeared drunk when he got up to speak at a Nerf gala. ‘Global warming’s a load of rubbish,’ he shouted, before driving off in his Ferrari.

  Peter and Sarah tried to follow him, but found only his wrecked car. There was no sign of his body. ‘Guess he must have been thrown into the ocean,’ they sobbed.

  ‘Give me Morton’s money,’ yelled Drake.

  ‘I can’t,’ replied Peter. ‘His estate is in probate.’

  Drake stormed out.

  ‘What are we going to do now?’ asked Sarah.

  ‘Not so fast,’ said Kenner, abseiling in through the window. ‘You two are coming with me.’

  On the way to Antarctica, Kenner delivered a long lecture on how global warming wasn’t really happening, and that many scientists had allowed themselves to be lured into a state of fear by environmental pressure groups.

  ‘Nerf is funding terrorists to create environmental catastrophes to reinforce their message,’ warned Kenner. ‘We have to stop them.’

  A day later, Sarah and Peter crawled out of a crevasse. They were bruised and bloodied, but at least they had prevented a huge piece of the ice-shelf from being calved off into the ocean.

  Two days after that, Sarah and Peter crawled out of a mudslide in Arizona. They were bruised and bloodied, but at least they had prevented another disaster.

  ‘Just the Solomon Islands to go,’ yelled Drake.

  Sarah and Peter looked at each other. They were about to die trying to save the world from a tsunami and they hadn’t declared their love for one another.

  ‘I’m alive,’ shouted Morton, as he rescued them.
‘The world is saved, and I’m going to start a new environmental organisation based on truth.’

  Author’s note: I’m very, very clever and have read a lot and you’re all stupid wishy-washy liberals.

  Digested read, digested: In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with Crichton, and the Word was Crichton.

  Hannibal Rising

  by Thomas Harris (2006)

  Imagine opening the door on Dr Hannibal Lecter’s memory palace. Let us journey portentously into its deepest recesses in a laboured bid to milk a prequel out of America’s cleverest serial killer.

  The eight-year-old Hannibal sat beside the castle moat with his younger sister, Mischa. A black swan begged for food. ‘Yes,’ he thought. ‘This is indeed a credibly gothic start to my story.’

  ‘Hurry children,’ their father cried. ‘We must escape the Nazis.’

  It was the second day of Operation Barbarossa. Grutas, Kolnas, Milko and Grentz committed indescribable acts of cruelty that were described in great detail. For that’s what Nazi collaborators always did.

  The Lecter family survived in the woods for more than a year, with young Hannibal wiling away his days memorising Euclid, until they were captured by the Nazi collaborators. Only Hannibal was found alive by the Soviets, a chain still attached to his neck.

  ‘The poor boy has been left mute,’ wept Hannibal’s uncle Robert, a noted painter.

  ‘Indeed,’ replied his wife, the impossibly beautiful and exotic Lady Murasaki. ‘He has suffered unimaginable horrors that readers can all too easily guess. We must take him back to our French chateau.’

  The fall, as the French don’t call autumn, was late that year as Lady Murasaki nursed Hannibal back to speech. First, a farting flubber sound; then fully formed words.

  See how Hannibal looks at Lady Murasaki. Hear how he cries out, ‘Mischa’ in his nightmares. Notice how the text switches to italics and the present tense. Recognise the hand of a master storyteller with no editor.

  ‘Oi, Japonnaise,’ yelled the coarse butcher, who was well known in the village as a Nazi sympathiser. ‘Does your pussy go crossways?’

  Robert dropped dead from a heart attack, as Hannibal entered Lady Murasaki’s boudoir and removed her samurai sword. Later that day the dismembered body of the butcher was found next to the post-box.

  ‘I want to run a polygraph test on you, young Hannibal,’ said Inspector Popil. ‘Be my guest,’ replied the 13-year-old evenly.

  Not a flicker. ‘My, but you’re a poisson froid,’ Popil countered. ‘I know you did it but I can’t prove it.’

  Hannibal and Lady Murasaki moved to Paris, where the young man became the most remarkable boy in the capital by memorising every textbook within minutes and becoming the youngest ever medical student. Lady Murasaki feels an intense longing for Hannibal. Yet she knows she cannot reach him. She can also sense that Popil has feelings for her.

  ‘We have reached that random point in the plot where I need to introduce some looted art treasures,’ said Popil. ‘So I need your help tracking down your family’s long-lost Leonardos and Titians.’

  ‘Ah, good,’ laughed Hannibal. ‘I expect the looters are the same people who killed my family. That will give me an excuse to go to Lithuania and kill a few of them in graphic detail.’

  ‘I know you executed those people and ate some of their flesh,’ Popil snarled, ‘but I can’t prove it.’

  ‘Oh Noh, Hannibal,’ sobbed Lady Murasaki, undoing her gown and exposing her nakedness. ‘You can take me if you renounce your course of violence.’

  ‘I can’t,’ Hannibal said. ‘For they ate Mischa.’

  See how the reader struggles to feign surprise.

  ‘You must hand these Nazis over to me,’ Popil implored.

  ‘But did you not yourself collaborate with the Nazis?’

  ‘I did, but only a little bit once. We are all imperfect.’

  Hannibal returned to the dissection table and opened the brain of a recently guillotined man. Over the next few days Milko and Kolnas were found hideously mutilated, their wounds lovingly documented over many pages.

  Only the showdown remained.

  ‘You ate Mischa, too,’ Grutas laughed.

  See how the reader struggles to feign surprise.

  A bloodbath ensued.

  Hannibal smiled. He had got away with his greatest crime to date. A bestselling thriller with no thrills at all.

  Digested read, digested: À la recherche de corps perdus.

  Beneath the Bleeding

  by Val McDermid (2007)

  Dr Tony Hill was working late at Bradfield Moor secure hospital. He heard a noise outside his office and went to investigate. The last thing he saw before he lost consciousness was an axe hacking into his knee, splintering bone and pumping jets of blood across the corridor.

  ‘You’re awake then,’ DCI Carol Jordan observed as she visited Tony in the ICU.

  ‘What are you doing here?’

  ‘Oh, I dunno. Just creating a little sexual frisson between us before the main action kicks off.’

  ‘My leg is agony,’ he gasped.

  ‘Tough,’ DCI Jordan laughed, pressing on his open wound. ‘If you couldn’t stand a little pain and gore, you should have stayed in an Ian Rankin book.’

  In another part of Bradfield, Yousef began to carefully prepare the explosives. ‘Only a few days to go,’ he muttered to himself.

  Robbie Bishop lay dying of ricin poisoning, his bloated body as unrecognisable as that of Bradfield Victoria’s star midfielder.

  DCI Jordan called in her team.

  ‘I’m a lesbian,’ announced Chris. ‘And I’m proud to be out.’

  ‘Me, too,’ chipped in Paula.

  ‘Great,’ said Carol. ‘Now we’ve established that two-thirds of the women in my squad are gay, have you got anything for me?

  ‘Bishop and his celebrity DJ girlfriend had a stalker,’ they replied.

  Tony shook his head. ‘It’s not him. He doesn’t fit the profile.’

  ‘I don’t care,’ said Carol. ‘There’s always one pointless wild goose chase in detective fiction so I’m going to waste 50 pages going after him anyway.’

  Tony entered the mortuary. If he was going to get anywhere with the case he had to deal with some unresolved issues concerning his mother; and for that he needed to be alone with Bishop.

  ‘So my mum is a bit of a nightmare,’ he whispered in Bishop’s putrid ear. Suddenly he felt his mind clearing. ‘The person who did this to you has killed before.’ He limped to his computer and began a search. ‘Got you,’ he smiled, as he came across a lottery winner who had been poisoned with belladonna.

  ‘Bishop and the lottery winner went to the same school,’ Tony said. ‘Our man will be a classmate who is jealous of their success.’

  ‘That’s the most ridiculous piece of psychobabble I’ve ever heard,’ said Carol.

  Yousef checked his watch. It was time. He drove the van to Bradfield Victoria’s ground. In a couple of hours, everyone in Britain would have heard of him. So be it. He would be thousands of miles away.

  Tony settled down with Carol in front of the TV to watch Bradfield play Spurs. Midway through the first half, a massive explosion tore through the stands. Limbs and torsos were scattered everywhere.

  ‘OK,’ said Carol to her team, ‘We’ve got a major incident here.’

  The door cracked open and two stubble-faced men barged in. ‘We’re from the counter-terrorism squad,’ they snarled. ‘This has all the hallmarks of al-Qaida. We’re going to shake down every Mozzer in town.’

  ‘You’re wrong,’ Tony muttered. ‘This doesn’t look like terrorism to me. What we’ve got here is a Jewish woman who tricked her Muslim lover into blowing himself and her husband up.’

  ‘That’s absurd,’ said Carol. ‘Why would anyone blow up 35 people just to get rid of a husband and lover?’

  ‘Look,’ Tony snarled, ‘as we’re in a thriller written by a woman, you’ve got to expect an abno
rmally high body count. And as you caught the poisoner who went to school with Bishop, I think you owe me an apology.’

  ‘You’re right,’ Carol concurred. ‘Again.’

  ‘It’s nothing,’ Tony replied tenderly, taking her hand. ‘It’s all in a book’s work.’

  Digested read, digested: DCI Jordan is not quite yet over the Hill.

  The Troubled Man

  by Henning Mankell (2011)

  The rain hammered against the window. Kurt Wallander sank lower into his armchair, his thoughts returning to the futility of his existence. What had he to show for his career? A failed marriage, a lonely old age and still Ystad was teeming with paedophiles and political corruption. His phone rang. He picked it up wearily.

  ‘How are you, Dad?’ It was his daughter Linda. ‘Cold, depressed and I think I’m getting Alzheimer’s.’ ‘Then at least you’ll have forgotten what a bad parent you were. But that’s not why I’m calling. Hans and I have just had a baby.’ ‘What’s its name?’ ‘It doesn’t have one yet. Hans’s parents are having a party next week so you can see it then.’ ‘Do I have to go?’

  The sleet stung Wallander’s face as he walked up the Von Enkes’ path. ‘It’s good to finally meet the other grandfather,’ said Håkan and Louise. ‘Is it?’ Against his better judgment, Wallander had begun to enjoy himself when Håkan invited him into his study after dinner. ‘I’m a worried man,’ Håkan said. ‘I was a submarine commander during the cold war and I believe there were spies in the Swedish navy who have never been unmasked.’ ‘Whom do you suspect?’ Wallander asked. ‘I cannot say right now because that would spoil the story.’ Wallander remained silent. He had the feeling Håkan had been trying to tell him something. But what?

  Hail reduced visibility to near zero. Wallander felt a tightness across his chest. He was having a heart attack. What a sad way to die, he thought, not even knowing his granddaughter’s name. He undid his shirt button and the pressure eased. Maybe he just needed a new shirt. His phone rang. He picked it up wearily. ‘We’re calling our daughter Klara,’ Linda said. ‘And Håkan’s disappeared.’