Chapter 29

From the author

Thank you very much for taking an interest in my work.

This book refers to a real life event; the deadly hajj incident which occurred on September 24, 2015. I tried to get Carstairs in position on that very day but didn’t quite manage it, as the events leading up to it were timed realistically and I really did want to give him a week to pull together his show in Las Vegas. Rewriting the entire story, accounting for weekends and all that comes with it, just to match that date seemed silly. And so in this book hajj occurs a few days later than it really did in 2015.

I’m not a great believer in finding out how the sausage is made, so you may want to stop reading at this point. However, you might actually be interested to know about some changes I made to this story, the remnants of which you will occasionally have spotted. I’m aware of the concept of Chekhov’s Gun, which is that if you show a gun in the first act, you’d better bloody use it by the third act. Well, perhaps. But I’m also aware of the fact you can ruin a perfectly good sweater just because you insist on cutting off that one loose thread. Before you know it the arm has come off. Many details I insert just to aid in ‘world building’ may come to my rescue later on. Pruning them, and the jokes within them, just to adhere to some arbitrary set of rules and conventions seems weird. This isn’t literature and we all know it.

The original idea for Alexandra was that she had gotten herself pregnant, which she was hiding under the abaya. Then she’d be held as collateral by the Mexican cartel, prompting a rescue mission set in the Mexican jungle. Alexandra would have died during the rescue, but her baby would have survived. Martin would have handed the child over to Caroline. She would care for the child as her own from then on. I cut this entire section because it would probably have added another book to the story. Thus, she remains a rather uninteresting character.

As I’ve written about a few stage performances by Martin, I felt it would be dull to describe another one. And so I focussed on the preparations this time, and left it to the reviews to give you an idea of how it went. I envisaged a clean cut between Martin going on stage for the first time and then moving forward to the plane ride home, but I was afraid I’d get mails that a chapter was missing so I’m not sure if I pulled off that effect.

Martin’s pilgrimage is perhaps surprisingly detailed for a book such as this, but I’ve done a shedload of research and thought it might be nice to do the tour with Martin’s sarcastic commentary. There are very few detailed travelogues about the modern hajj. I guess people prefer to take selfies. Furthermore, information on just about anything to do with Arab culture in general (headwear nomenclature being a prime example, as I’ve discovered) and the hajj in particular was often contradictory or surprisingly vague. I’m sure there are several factual errors, but it might just be the most realistic report on the hajj from an outside perspective you’ll ever read in English. However, I did not find a convincing way for Martin to cause and be present during the incident and it would have served little purpose anyway. Him causing it accidentally from miles and miles away without even realising it, and with no way to claim it for his horrible video, seemed funnier. Well, it did at the time.

Another thing I’ve had to skip was a street race between Martin and the obnoxious son of the crooked imam. That would have occurred before Martin blew up the mosque in the previous book. Even though that race would have been interesting to read about, because in Saudi there are illegal street races where terrible accidents happen with alarming frequency, Martin would not have been able to just walk away from that if he were more than a passive observer. As racing isn’t very easy to write about anyway, I decided to not explore that further.

Martin also didn’t uncover a hidden brothel from which he freed a number of enslaved Western women, although those also exist in Saudi Arabia. But it took far too long to write this tome as it is and would only detract from the main story, so I skipped that. In fact, it was all supposed to be ONE book from Doha to the missile launch, but as you know it became a three book story. I had no intention of spending four years living with this bloody story in my head, but there we are.