Running Backwards

A rambling comic journal documenting the author’s kak-handed investigation into the death of a student thirty years previously, for which he might, or might perhaps not, be culpable.

The author, a fustian middle-aged misanthrope, who hides behind a series of infantile pseudonyms - Tim Cruise, Bryan Reynolds - is foundering in the wake of his wife’s death, fatigued by his own mediocrity and struggling to accept his progressive irrelevance in the life of his beloved but vinegary daughter.

A series of increasingly compelling dreams begin to hint at the memory of murder, and a developing paranoia delivers him into the questionable care of a has-been celebrity therapist, who quickly hands his intimate revelations to a pernicious barrow-boy book agent specialising in true-life trash. Through subtle blackmail, contractual skulduggery and the revelation of seemingly irrefutable evidence the agent persuades the author that he must go on the run and record his attempts to uncover the truth before the authorities get wind of his historical misdeeds. Convinced of his own iniquity, he allows himself to be manoeuvred into abandoning his life and writing a ruinous confessional, whilst reeling around the country on his knackered old motorbike, hounded by his own inadequacies.

Quickly proving himself to be an inept detective, he stumbles through his adventure, failing to find much in the way of wits to live off, and blundering into the complicated lives of discarded university acquaintances whom he hopes will lead him to a possible accomplice and the one person able to shed light on the demise of their alleged victim. When a former girlfriend, now a journalist, takes an interest in his story and threatens an investigation of her own, his mission assumes greater urgency.

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