are you ready for a jarring shift in tone

yes. YES. let’s GO

alright shit. goddamn. fuck

now this is just classic British tactical writing - baffling nickname out of nowhere, ‘edgy’, ‘burnt’

would you be surprised to learn that the man he shot did not have a MAC 10, or in fact any firearm, on or near him, and that the cop’s evidence was described by the coroner as ‘not rationally believable’

anyway turn the page and

I loved my time at Professor Vanderklerk’s prep school

dark triad shit

normal country of normal people

his ‘medical’ consists of showing a panel of three doctors his arsehole and then asking him what colour a toy police car is to check he isn’t colourblind

lesson one: be racist

FACKINMETSAN

DI humour

intriguing

he sneaks out of foot patrol to go to the cinema a lot. fills helmet with popcorn

he is briefly suspended from driving because he gets in too many accidents. he is thus assigned the nickname ‘Chi-Chi’. because, you see, he fucks pandas

some field expedient torture

he joins the borough equivalent of the SPG. they have one van, which is inexplicably painted red. they steal the sirens off an ambulance and a single red light from a traffic police Land Rover for it

hmm

he wrote this book after getting acquitted of murdering the guy in the prologue and yet all he seems to do is confess to more racially motivated crimes

‘obvious white agitators,’ you see

uh huh

curious memory you have

finding out that during the Brixton Riots the SPG staged in the car park of Dulwich College is the least surprised I have ever been

ants. white agitators

an inspector next to him gets knocked unconscious by a brick so he steals his helmet because it’s nicer than his

SPG apparently trained a lot and did a lot of large scale exercises around the possibility of dirty bombs, which is an interesting view into the government’s worries given that the IRA were getting away with entirely conventional ones at the time

it is amusing that you have all of these hardcore police fascist types doing all this and then, inevitably, the SAS show up and tell them all to fuck off

???

botched is one word for it

the met’s firearms units are amateur fiefs

beg pardon

they train with the SAS, who once again own them

the one time he’s actually perceptive is about soldiers

ah. thus the title

a beautiful romance

to be a firearms officer you have to be very normal