The Implosion Trilogy Series

‘They Win. You Lose. Sex, Violence & Songs from the Shows’ by Stan Arnold is the first of eight very funny thrillers - The Implosion Saga - and it’s FREE! Mick and Jim are two incompetent, Soho-based, corporate video producers, operating at the bottom of a barrel that no one wants to scrape. They drink too much, don’t earn enough and get too many death threats. So when gangsters demand back rent of £6,000 plus VAT, they have ten minutes to do a runner. All they have is an old Morris Traveller and a tank full of petrol. The chase involves frantic attempts to preserve their lives and reproductive organs. They battle inefficiently scheduled sex with Southsea’s most colour-blind landlady, violent amateur dramatics, AK-47-weilding milliners, 80-year-old punk grannies and hit men dressed in pink Mexican outfits. Under constant threat, they take a mystery job in Las Vegas, where they are pursued by six Reservoir Dogs lookalikes. They make a sort of escape using the world’s most mercenary cab driver. During the next 24 hours, Mick and Jim chicken out a freight train, walk six moonlit miles across the desert with cactus-punctured groins, find out what badly manufactured LSD can do to you, avoid Thelma and Louise suicide-a-likes, possibly have sex with Peter Fonda and Dennis Hopper, make a commitment in front of a Bourbon-fuelled Elvis at Big Derek’s Gay Marriage Emporium and blow up a Harley Davidson. The final showdown takes place with the gangster boss in the world’s most unspeakably lurid theatrical environment. A very neat twist propels them from sudden death into a totally different way of life. Or does it?

Mick and Jim are two incompetent, Soho-based, corporate video producers, operating at the bottom of a barrel that no one wants to scrape. They drink too much, don’t earn enough and get too many death threats. Mrs Hathaway, Mick & Jim's svelte, hyper-fit, 60-year-old office cleaning lady does martial arts and extreme sports courses via video and online. Daring Dooz is a global magazine, run by wimp, Giles Montagu-Scott (formerly Cyril Tweedy). The magazine features the totally fictitious adventures of scantily-clad women. But Mrs Hathaway is the real thing. She becomes world-famous because of the spectacular way she disarmed a bank robber in London. This leads to her being tracked down by Giles who sees her as a way of giving his magazine some legitimacy, at last. She meets with Giles at the Shard in London, initially thinking he wants to talk about an £8 an hour cleaning contract. But he offers her £2 million to take on a series of challenges around the world. Mick and Jim are coerced into filming, and sharing, her unbelievably dangerous exploits. Love interest is provided by Aubrey Capability Brown - gofer for the ruthless, international crime boss, Charley Sumkins. Aubrey is basically a pig-ignorant, self-obsessed, devious, regularly-beaten-up, little rat. But there is a spark. Mrs Hathaway knows Charley Sumkins' big secret and uses it to get him to call off his enforcers, Vlad and Vic. She has information that will be released if Aubrey or Mrs Hathaway die in mysterious circumstances. This information will totally destroy Charlie's reputation. When Charlie finds out about the dangerous Daring Dooz challenges, he is worried stiff that she might be killed and his secret will come out. The Daring Dooz challenges include sailing across the Atlantic - the highlights of which include rescuing Aubrey when he falls overboard, and using him as a weapon to beat of a shark attack. Daring Dooz Challenge Two involves Mrs Hathaway flying a World War II Catalina seaplane in an incident-packed trip to the Amazon, including MiG fighters and a time-warp. Once she arrives at the village in the Amazon, she meets Hamish, the head man, who has been taught English by a Glaswegian fraudster and drunk, masquerading as a missionary. Challenge Three is to tightrope walk across the 150-foot drop of a thunderous waterfall, videoed by Mick and Jim hanging from the cable in a hastily constructed box. The challenge is made more difficult as it is caiman mating season and sex-mad, 20-foot caimans are shooting over the falls' edge, as they film. Challenge Four is the Black Pool - to locate it and dive into it's unexplored depths. However, the Black Pool turns out to be not what they expected. On returning to the village, a small group of heavily armed bandits, with an interest in the Black Pool, have taken over. Mrs Hathaway escapes, but Mick and Jim are captured. Giles Montagu-Scott hears of the problem and for the first time in his life does something courageous based on the dubious power of his international, bedsitter-based readership, the Daring Doozers. Eventually, just as all seems lots, the bandits are defeated and suffer a well-deserved fate. Finally on the flight home, some unbelievably strange things happen. Things that will make headline news around the world and change everybody's lives in ways that none of them could imaging in their wildest dreams.

Mick and Jim are two incompetent, Soho-based, corporate video producers, operating at the bottom of a barrel that no one wants to scrape. They drink too much, don’t earn enough and get too many death threats. They are forced into an unexpected visit to the little seaside town of Playa Blanca in Lanzarote. They book into Sea View, a bizarre re-creation of a 1950's Blackpool boarding house, right next to the beach. Sea View is run by the maniacal Fernando who is learning English at a local bar, where holidaying Brits are teaching him a vast range of obscene phrases which he mixes happily with his innate courtesy and friendliness. Mick and Jim arrive with video footage which they think will make them millions, but a short telephone call to the BBC reveals they have been thwarted - and that the footage is worthless. Down but not out, they decide to do what normal people do, and take a holiday break. On their first afternoon, while enjoying a pedalo ride, they are threatened with assassination by both the CIA and KGB, and drawn into a web of espionage lies, deceit and sexual excess involving MI7 - so secret, even MI5 and MI6 don't know about it. We find out more about MI7 and its 'Mata Hari' team - specially trained to extract information while seducing enemy agents. The team of six includes a 60-year old ex-contortionist, a Girton College Cambridge graduate masquerading as a chav, a mature, land-owning aristocrat, a cool dungareed lady, Olga, a super-fit Norwegian, and Moira MacPherson, who appeared briefly in Daring Dooz as the chairwoman of Aberdeen's Society of Global Missionary Zeal and Probity. The head of MI7, Jimmi Bond, apart from putting up with the jokes, has brought the team together in Playa Blanca with an extremely serious goal - to avoid the end of the world as we know it. The CIA agent, Chuck Berry III (no relation) and the KGB agent Boris Pasternak (no relation) are in town, because they've heard that something big is going down. As they are starved of information, Chuck persuades Boris to defect so they can work together. One by one, the MI7 agents disappear in mysterious ways. For example, Mick and Jim find an empty pedalo (The Marie Celeste) abandoned at midnight, with just the remains of a Thermos flask of hot coffee and two partially eaten ham sandwiches. The local Police Chief is a long-term Anglophile with poor English - 'I love St. Pauline's Cathedral' - interviews Mick and Jim about the disappearances and tells them they are not suspects, although he has a range of double-crosses and ulterior motives up his sleeve. Mick and Jim end up in the nearly-infamous Cell 102, with just two stools and a bucket for company. Their route to freedom involves prostituting their professional standards (not that they have any), a rusty helicopter on the police station roof and two aggressive Louisiana swamp cowboys who are attending a local Harley Davidson Rally. Part of the solution involves flying Wayne over from the UK. Wayne is a hyperactive, over-enthusiastic, Game Boy-playing video production gofer, who dreams of Steven Spielberg asking him to say 'It's a wrap'. When Mick and Jim are freed, Wayne reveals that Boris and Chuck have moved into the Sea View Guest House. Following a desperate climb to their attic room, using the plastic vines adorning the front of the Guest House, Mick and Jim decide to keep watch as they are the only residents, apart from Jimmi, Chuck and Boris. Someone has to make a move. The climatic bullet-riddled showdown in an auditorium built into a volcanic blow-hole is orchestrated by Polly, the world's most foul-beaked parrot. Adventure over, and back in their Soho offices, Mick and Jim use their version of the Erle Stanley Gardner plot wheel to decide their future. Just as they have reached a decision, something happens to make them reconsider. The option on offer appears evil, sinister and, certainly,

Mick and Jim are two incompetent, Soho-based, corporate video producers, operating at the bottom of a barrel that no one wants to scrape. They drink too much, don’t earn enough and get too many death threats. They are lured to deepest Yorkshire to film a bogus 'most haunted' video at a 13th-century castle built by architectural vandal, Gregory the Imbiber. The local village is having mass hallucinations about Dracula, Frankenstein and werewolves. A mysterious death, leads our heroes to places they don't want to be - like being trapped 350 feet underground with a jar of pickled whelks, or facing the wrath of Scotland Yard's nastiest - DCI Cragg. Plus terrifying paranormal activities, mad neuroscientists, and Hollywood glamour and glitz, featuring Matt Damon. Just another day in the Dales...

Mick and Jim are two incompetent, Soho-based, corporate video producers, operating at the bottom of a barrel that no one wants to scrape. They drink too much, don’t earn enough and get too many death threats. After a very serious nights’ drinking, Mick and Jim make friends with a killer wolf, called Twinkle. This triggers a period of serious alcoholic abstinence, during which Jim is hit with a half-brick and they are offered dubious jobs as paparazzi, by the world’s worst photographer. The early action swings between the It’s alright he won’t bite Urban Wolf Sanctuary in Norwood, the offices of Solicitor at Law, Digby Elton-John and his new Astronaut bride, Wynetta, and the architecturally challenged, VAT-undocumented 3Ls pub in Greek Street, Soho. An unfortunate photograph leads to a deadly brush with a secret elite underground organisation which, in turn, results in them fleeing undercover to Glencoe in Scotland, to help make a slasher movie, Little Blood-Red McRiding Hood. They just about cope with Miss Dribble, a sex-mad, writer of bodice-rippers, a egomaniacal Erik von Stroheim look-a-like director with LA-based Haemoglobin Productions and a Sicilian hitman, called Heidi. They survive the dangers of eating tea cakes in the Copper Sporran, having their bedroom roof violently removed by a cannonball from the American Civil War and being blown up in the presence of 60,000 bottles of illegal Glencoe Massacre Scotch whisky. A poignant ending on the arctic tundra is facilitated by a tramp from Margate and an ex-KGB agent running a pizzeria in Lanzarote.

Mick and Jim are two incompetent, Soho-based, corporate video producers, operating at the bottom of a barrel that no one wants to scrape. They drink too much, don’t earn enough and get too many death threats. Following on from Book Four in the Implosion Saga - Vampire Midwives - Mick heads to Hollywood to try and save Jim's soul and any other parts of him that might be useful around the office. He is forced to accept grade-A loafer, ex-apprentice and inanimate object, Wayne. as a travelling companion. Staying at a bizarre villa in the heart of Hollywood, they embark on a series of disastrous attempts to remove Jim's recently acquired demons, using a range of dubious alternative therapies. Wayne is being pursued by shadowy Bulgarian heavies, intent on removing his iVone (the teak-veneered Bulgarian equivalent of the iPhone). Things come to a head after a visit to one of Hollywood's most notorious names, and the discovery of the true secret of the iVone. The results are a one-sided gun battle, an escape through the sewers and an explosion that shifts the San Andreas fault by six feet. Add in devious sliver screen look-a-likes, rubberised hang gliders, outrageous cat litter TV commercials, and a big impactful finish, and you have a neat end to the Saga. Back home safe at last. But what's that incontinent wolf doing, howling outside the office door in the middle of the afternoon?

Mick and Jim are two incompetent, Soho-based, corporate video producers, operating at the bottom of a barrel that no one wants to scrape. They drink too much, don’t earn enough and get too many death threats. Our heroes are on a routine are on a shoot, when they discover a dead body in a packing case. They are interviewed by Scotland Yard's most repulsive rozzer, DCI Cragg, who tells them they are prime suspects. However, he offers them a way out, providing they act as his 'eyes ears and nostrils' in a mysterious euro-case. They end up vaguely tracking down un-specified criminality in Geneva, Amsterdam, Hull, the Greek island of Santorini, and a fairy tale castle in Germany. Directions are provided by a stream of weird emails from Cragg, written in the style of Sherlock Holmes, William Wordsworth and the 1940's private eye, Philip Marlowe. Communication isn't helped by Jim's inability to use his new smartphone. When sending urgent messages, he's often treated to videos showing how remove a bull's testicles or get chip fat off a chandelier. Still, the adventure involves getting hit by 100 gallons of water a second, dealing with kebab-stained military secrets, in-cell explosions, playing poker for bits of concrete, being stuck on a bus with four anally incontinent goats, and enduring the lust of Lozania, the Songstress of Santorini, all while being tracked by Otto, the bowler-hatted assassin. The final showdown involves Mick and Jim's ex-wives, an Otto look-a-like, a helicopter rescue and a charabanc full of SAS-trained cops toting Heckler & Koch submachine guns. In the end, Mick and Jim are left pondering how much of their ordeal was due to their innate incompetence and how much of it was just one giant confidence trick.

Mick and Jim are two incompetent, Soho-based, corporate video producers, operating at the bottom of a barrel that no one wants to scrape. They drink too much, don’t earn enough and get too many death threats. When the New York slasher movie awards - The Bleeders - turn into a riot, Mick and Jim are offered a mystery escape route to Hong Kong. Inexplicably, they arrive in Darwin, Australia, where they’re kidnapped and held in the deserted, snake-ridden Broken Nose Hotel - 300 miles from the nearest can of lager. Escape attempts result in damaged reproductive bits, while igniting the fury of ex-SAS Sgt Major and international, freelance, unarmed-combat specialist, Rosebud Rochester. Thanks to her aggressive, but romantic, liaison with Baz, who likes being locked in the attic, Mick and Jim eventually escape to a local river, where, on an improvised raft cum toilet block, they fight off copulating saltwater crocodiles and sharks, while being battered by tropical storms and lightning strikes. After an ignominious escape, they arrive in Hong Kong and have to solve an ancient Chinese puzzle. Why are they there? How does James Bond fit in? How did they get trapped in a luxury suite inside a hollowed-out volcano? Why are they fans of Bert Grit? And what is Pussy Galore doing working as a toilet attendant in Venice. Killer SWAT teams, massive explosions, stun grenades and close-quarter helicopter attacks ensure a happy ending.