Conville & Walsh Ltd

Conville & Walsh Ltd
Fiction
A LIGHT-HEARTED LOOK AT MURDER
Mark Watson
Praise for BULLET POINTS
unnervingly accomplished
– OBSERVER
a fledgling Nabokov for the era of Big Brother
– Boyd Tonkin in his roundup of 2004’s best books for the INDEPENDENT
When German student, Andreas Hönig, arrives to study late-Romantic literature at Cambridge in the
mid 1980s, he hopes to discover what kind of man he wants to be. Leaving behind in Berlin a father
who has never recovered from his wife’s sudden death and a younger brother who is becoming
increasingly involved with right-wing causes, Andreas has no idea that before a year is out he will be
earning his living as a Hitler impersonator. Uncomfortable at first, he begins to reason that, by demystifying
Hitler through comedy, he can help Germans to come to terms with their guilt and help the
British to understand better the German mentality.
Andreas meets and falls in love with Rose, an improbably tall fellow student, and after graduation they
set up a look-alike agency – supplying performers who resemble celebrities for corporate
entertainment and comedy clubs. Andreas’ Hitler act is the most successful of them all, but sickened
that Rose increasingly expects to be dominated by ‘Hitler’ in bed and confronted by his brother’s neonazism,
he decides to hang up the moustache at the height of his success. It proves to be a
disastrous move, culminating in a final, drunken bout of violent love-making which leaves Rose dead
and Andreas imprisoned for manslaughter.
It is not until the present day that Andreas is able to tell his story to Alexandra, a young literacy
assistant at the prison where he lives out a life sentence. Alexandra has her own complicated personal
life to come to terms with but teams up with her flatmate and reluctant love-interest, Gareth, to
translate and unpick the bizarre story. As they get closer to the truth, they discover that the gap
between impersonation and emulation, between role-play and real-life, between comedy and
something far darker, is all to easily crossed.
Mark Watson is a phenomenally successful stand-up comedian in the UK who has won numerous
awards and is a cornerstone of the Edinburgh International Comedy Festival, where this year he
stunned critics with a marathon 36-hour comedy show. At the same time as forging a career as a
performer, Mark has established himself as a serious literary voice with his debut novel, BULLET
POINTS, in 2004, which attracted highly impressive reviews across the board. Now 26, Mark is
researching his third novel – a portrait of a professor obsessed with cryogenics and of the quasireligious
cult he builds around himself in the quest to live forever.
UK Publisher Chatto & Windus
Delivery November 2006
UK Publication July 2007
Status Manuscript
Length 86,000 words
Agent EJ
All rights available excluding UK & Commonwealth
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