In Which Ray Banks Blows Up A Small Town In Hertfordshire

"When I was a man, the wind blew cold, the hills were upside down."

Crossing Ray Banks is a bad idea.

No, seriously.

See, this whole thing started many, many years ago...

(The mists of nostalgia descend...)

(...then ascend again)

Fuck all that mildly competitive history. It's not important right now. All ye need to know is that once upon a time, before either of us was doing much in the way of forging promising careers in the field of scribblage, Ray Banks and I were...friends. Difficult as it may seem to believe in light of recent events, the two of us once lorded it up in the same MSN chatroom. Then we met. Then Mr. Banks scaled the walls of a toilet stall in a positively heroic attempt to rescue a semi-conscious Mr. O'Mahony from...uh...semi-consciousness. Then we met a second time. Then I half-carried the gentleman known in certain revolutionary circles as El Presidente to a waiting cab after he'd had one too many glasses of Scotch.

Then...nothing, for a while. I drifted off into internet obscurity while Raymond married some kick-ass chick from the other side of the pond and published a short, brutal, and annoyingly good novel entitled The Big Blind.

And then...well...then Jennifer Jordan came along and hauled me into some project called Fuck Noir, I took my time coming up with a first draft of my contribution (almost finished, I swear!), and Ray, apparently now hired on as Ms. Jordan's muscle, started leaning on me.

Now, I know some of you have seen the types of films and read the types of books where innocent folk are leaned on by harsh and unforgiving villains, and I know that there's a picture in your head right now of big lads dishing out idle threats and a bit of a slapping in order to make their point. And that's fine. It'll give you a basis of comparison for what happened next.

You see, Ray Banks didn't come round my house with a couple of his boys and give me a bit of a kicking. That would have been much too simple and cliched for the kind of mind I now know this evil bastard possesses. No, Ray Banks needed something bigger than that, something spectacular.

So Ray Banks blew up Hemel Hempstead.

And then, as though igniting sixty million gallons of fuel and getting the attention of the world's media wasn't enough, the fucker somehow arranged it so that my recent transfer left me working in a Home Entertainment store some two miles from the site of the explosion. Every time I get off the train and walk up the hill to work, I have to do it with a scarf over my face, protecting my sensitive lungs from clouds of acrid black smoke.

The story's coming, I swear, just as fast as my sausage fingers can type. Call him off, JJ, call him off!