SCENES FROM THE BARBERSHOP FLOOR

Added on 27 March 2020

In these dark times, we must all do what we can. If you’re Bob Dylan, you release a seventeen-minute song about the sixties. And if you’re me, you write more Barney Thomson...

I’ve been toying with the idea for a while, a kind of weekly, Barney episode. There’s a scene in Curse Of The Clown, where I have the men of the shop contemplate the fact their set-up is like a sitcom. Three men in the same location every day, chatting inane drivel, where nothing ever happens. (That’s excluding the fact that things always happen in Barney novels, because they’re still crime fiction, rather than literary fiction, but there are innumerable barbershop scenes that could be placed in any book, at any time.)

So, that’s the idea. A weekly episode, every Friday afternoon, from the barbershop. Maybe I’ll do it for a few weeks, no one will read it, and it will end up in that great, mass artistic graveyard. Or perhaps it will take off, become the distraction in these ill-begotten days, this time next year it will have eight million readers, it will get made into a long-running TV series starring Ewan MacGregor, and I’ll still be writing it when I’m eighty.

Odds not great on the latter tbh.

Either way, click on the image to read the pilot episode.