The End of Barney Thomson

Added on 07 September 2009

When I wrote the first Barney Thomson novel, Winston Churchill was Prime Minister, Accrington Stanley were top of the 1st Division and a pint of milk cost £9.25. Now, all these years later, it’s time to wrap Barney up and consign him to the waste bin of crime thriller history. There may be a hundred and five Rebus novels out there; Miss Marple may have solved three or four cases every day before lunch; the Hardy Boys may have been written by committee and existed forever and ever at the same age, never growing old and helping to arrest every criminal in the United States; but this is not the way of the barbershop warrior. It’s time for Barney to hang up his scissors. 

And so, The Final Cut has finally been released, and the long saga of Barney Thomson is at an end. As Churchill himself said: Never have so many words been written by so few people about someone cutting hair. It was only meant to be a one-off, and now it’s a seven-off.

But enough is enough. Like The Magnificent 7, Seven Brides For Seven Brothers and Seven Angry Men, the number of the counting shall be seven, and that’s it for Barney Thomson.

They think it’s all over. And it is.