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Zygomaticus

‘If Death Was Something Money Could Buy, the Rich Would Live, the Poor Would Die.’

I’ve always had trouble with titles. My last collection, Old Devil Moon, borrowed the title of a beautiful but forgotten song from a peculiarly whimsical sixties musical about racism, socialism, drugs and, er, leprechauns, called Finian’s Rainbow. Originally I was going to call this volume The Horrors, a phrase often associated with wartime and panic, a sudden overwhelming sense of the weight of the world. Put another way, a rush of awareness. My mother still speaks of having ‘an attack of the horrors’. But I realised that the title would prove misleading to anyone expecting the frisson of revulsion you get from exposure to blood and guts—these are tales that step into areas of unease rather than the abattoir.

Red Gloves suggests to me that no-one is innocent, and carries all sorts of interesting connotations, from Macbeth to giallo. The hand stained with blood is a mark of lost innocence.

At the start of each collection, I outline some of the press reports that have provoked me during the writing of the stories, and use them as a sort of timeline running beside the production of the book. The remit of journalism is to make the important interesting, but there are often times when it does the reverse; press releases are now routinely recycled as substitutes for real news. The absurdities of life we all face have a way of turning a genuine smile into a forced one, hence the title of this foreword. Zygomaticus refers to the muscle that makes the difference between two types of smile.