From Dave Langford’s inimitable Ansible this morning:
CHAZ BRENCHLEY answered _The Bookseller_’s appeal for reports of people in the book trade who’d been arrested while going about their lawful business. His own encounter was a near miss: `I was walking home, when a large stranger loomed up beside me and said hello. “You write books,” he told me. I admitted that this was true. “I know you do,” he said, “I used to follow you around.” At last, I thought, my very own celebrity stalker. “I’m a bouncer now,” he said, “but I used to be a store detective at Blackwell’s. You were just the type we were trained to keep an eye on. Cap, shades, long overcoat, you couldn’t look more suspicious. You used to come in every day and you never bought a book. I couldn’t catch you at it, but I just knew you were pinching. In the end I got my manager to look at you on the CCTV. `Oh, no,’ he told me. `That’s not a shoplifter. That’s an author.'”‘
(Peter comments: “Chaz could have been doing what lots of authors do — reordering the bookshelves to make sure his books were visible. Highly suspicious behavior…”)
