The Dog Catcher [Hardcover]

"'An excellent collection of dark, funny and bizarre short stories... brutally, cynically and honestly written... all in all a lot better than anything David Baddeil could ever manage.' Loaded on Barcelona Plates; '14 bleak funny pitiless tales... This is life looked at through the wrong end of a telescope, the vision of Nathaniel West in Miss Lonelyhearts, and to my mind just as good... Inside every fat git there's a poet trying to get out. Well, he's out.' Observer on Barcelona Plates; 'Sayle is a funny man, and these tales of pensioners-turned-hitmen, mysterious white Fiat Unos, and inveterate hypochondriacs defy you not to smile at the incremental absurdity of ordinary life.' The Sunday Times on Barcelona Plates; 'A cracking read.. dense with smart ideas, sour observations and loony rant's Independent on Sunday on Barcelona Plates; "Barcelona Plates will put a smile on your face and a chill down your spine" Time Out on Barcelona Plates; Alexei Sayle's manner on the page is the same as it is on screen and stage: arch, dessicated and menacing... 'The Last Woman Killed in the War' is a thrilling and sensitive meditation on history, race and identity; confirming Sayle as a brilliant chronicler of big stories set in small worlds." The Times"

'The Dog Catcher is filled with the black comedy, biting satire and quixotic characters which are his stock-in-trade.' --This text refers to the Paperback edition.

‘Every piece in Sayle's marvellous second collection combines strangeness and familiarity to moving and hilarious effect' --This text refers to the Paperback edition.

‘Dark and unsettling, but leavened with a dry sense of humour' --This text refers to the Paperback edition.

'I read these short stories with real pleasure. A few of them are superb; none is without something to enjoy.' --This text refers to the Paperback edition.

The acclaimed Barcelona Plates revealed Alexei Sayle as a writer with an outstanding ability to describe contemporary life in an unusual way. Now, in his new collection The Dog Catcher, he brilliantly captures the morals and absurdities of our socalled 'cool' culture, populated by characters as recognizable as they are memorable. The Dog Catcher will confirm Alexei Sayle's reputation as not only one of the great exponents of the short story genre, but also as a profound commentator on the way we live now.

Alexei Sayle is a comedian, actor, presenter and writer. His television work as a writer and performer includes The Young Ones, Alexei Sayle's Stuff, and The All New Alexei Sayle Show. He has written regularly for the Observer, Independent, Time Out, Car Magazine and Esquire and he has appeared in numerous films, from Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade to Gorky Park and Swing.

[1]THE DOG CATCHER

The woman came into the valley, whose Arabic name meant 'happiness', at the very start of the summer. She had hitchhiked up from the coast, along the highway that climbed twisting through the gorge into the foothills of the Sierra Nevadas. In the wide delta there had been fields of sugar cane, banana palms, custard apple orchards and waving clumps of bamboo, later on as they climbed into the campo there were steep terraces of olive trees, oranges and lemons, then on the rocky mesas almond trees, their leaves a beautiful spring green and the fruit hanging half formed. Nowhere were there the gigantic sheets of plastic, covering chemical-drunk, sweating vegetables, that disfigured the growing lands further up the coast towards Almeria. There had been decent spring rains that year and the acequias, the irrigation channels that the Romans had built, ran fresh with icy water.

She wasn't running away exactly but there were a number of men all along the Costa Tropical and Costa del Sol, one Latvian guy in particular, who it was better that she didn't see for a while, for his sake really, all that shouting and threatening every time he saw her couldn't be doing him any good. Some people just seemed to get so twisted around her, that was her opinion. She knew the reason for it, it was because she was too trusting, too giving, and individuals, guys especially, saw that as a green light to try and suck her dry. Aquarians were always taken advantage of, it was a scientific fact.

The woman's name was Sue, she was from the North of England, that part of the North West where all the towns ran into each other along motorways and bombed-out high streets. She had come to Spain on a whim not knowing really where Spain was, with a bloke of course - Aquarians had a great need to give and receive love, repeated studies had proved it. A nice posh lad with money who she met in a club in Liverpool. They'd been going round together for a couple of weeks when he said he was going out to DJ on the costa, he paid for her plane ticket and he paid for the rented flat in a smart urbanisation. After a bit she asked him why he didn't have any records or any turntables. He told her that he'd thought she understood that he was a conceptual DJ who played the music that he heard all the time in his head, straight into the heads of other people and the heads of cats and dogs too. Then he said he was also working on a machine to slow down time andreverse the flow of entropy. Then the Civil Guards came and took him away. Sometimes she tried to hear his music but she didn't think she could.

The idea of going back to England was a non-starter, her husband and kids had made such a fuss and her own mother had gone on the TV show Kilroy to denounce her. They all had to understand that she wasn't Thirty yet and let's face it she was fantastic-looking so she had the absolute right to have a good time before itwas too late. That's what feminism had taught her. So it was bar jobs in the town and other blokes after that and some of the blokes getting twisted. Then the Latvian trying to run her over and ploughing his Mercedes into the stack of butane canisters outside the supermercado. Once his burns healed she sensed he would come after her again so it was time to move on.

With her bag over her shoulder she walked to a big bar on the road out where the camionistas parked their trucks for one last brandy before slinging the rigs up the sinuous mountain roads. She asked around, looking for the perfect destination as if she were in a travel agent's. The old man in the wheezing lorry loaded down with watermelons, whose name was Antonio, said he was going back to his home, one of the villages in the foothills of the mountains. One with a stout wall around it built by the Moors, with a single gate in and out; where the road ended, he said, and where you could see a car coming from five kilometres away. To her it sounded like it might be a safe place; he said he would take her up there for a blow job which she bartered down to a hand job and a feel of her tits, pay ment to be made at journey's end.

They didn't go on the highway but took the old road, first through the tourist t owns, going so slowly that even car drivers towing caravans kept giving them the finger. Then Antonio swerved onto a narrow serpentine camino that bent up into the mountains, and the straining old truck seemed to be pushed up the slopes by the jets of thick black smoke that roared from its tailpipe. All the time Antonio spoke about his little town, its fine walls, its beautiful church, its lovely white-painted jumble of houses. And as if he had talked it into existence, suddenly, there it was above them, rising out of the orange groves, the red-tiled roofs of the houses poking above the thick stone walls.