SOME COPS BURN OUT. STAIN JUST SORT OF WENT OUT.

Stain used to be a copper.

Technically, he still is.

The distinction has become increasingly academic.

These days his principal professional skills are avoiding responsibility, disappointing his colleagues and consuming enough alcohol to make the remaining years before retirement pass with minimal conscious involvement.

He has history.

He has experience.

Once upon a time, he may even have been good at the job.

Nobody is particularly interested in remembering that now.

Least of all Stain.

STAIN – Dead & Gone is a short piece of grubby British crime fiction about a washed-up policeman who has settled comfortably into being useless until somebody makes the catastrophic administrative error of giving him a real case.

This unabridged audiobook edition is written and performed by James Desborough and runs for approximately 31 minutes.

Half an hour with a bad detective, a serious problem and the lingering possibility that somewhere underneath the booze and accumulated failure there may still be a policeman worth a damn.

Possibly.

MEET STAIN

Every police station has its furniture.

Desks.

Chairs.

Filing cabinets.

Stain.

He has been around long enough for past achievements to have become stories told by people who increasingly have trouble reconciling them with the man currently occupying the chair.

His career is winding down.

His enthusiasm went first.

Ambition followed.

Self-respect may have escaped through a bathroom window some years ago.

What remains is a man coasting towards retirement on alcohol, inertia and whatever residual goodwill can still be extracted from things he did when he was younger, sharper and considerably less interested in the contents of a bottle.

This arrangement suits him perfectly.

Nobody expects much.

Stain provides it.

Then somebody gives him an important case.

Bloody inconsiderate.

THE WRONG MAN FOR A REAL JOB

There is a particular cruelty in suddenly demanding competence from somebody who has carefully built a life around avoiding it.

Stain has made being written off comfortable.

If your colleagues think you are lazy, you do not get difficult assignments.

If they believe you are unreliable, nobody places anything important in your hands.

If everybody assumes your best days disappeared years ago, nobody expects you to produce another one.

It is an excellent system.

Until it stops working.

The case in Dead & Gone forces Stain back into the part of himself he has been neglecting.

He has to look.

Think.

Ask questions.

Actually give a shit.

That last one may be the hardest.

The question hanging over the story is not simply whether Stain can solve the problem put in front of him. It is whether there is enough of the old copper left to bother trying.

BRITISH CRIME WITHOUT THE POLISH

This is not detective fiction populated by brilliant eccentrics solving baroque murders between excellent dinners.

There is no country house.

No beautifully appointed office.

No immaculate private investigator who can identify the killer from an incorrectly folded napkin.

Stain belongs to the grubbier end of British crime fiction.

Cheap booze.

Institutional weariness.

Bad habits accumulated over too many years.

People who have spent enough time around crime that very little retains the glamour fiction traditionally tries to give it.

The humour comes from that same place.

Dry.

Bleak.

Sometimes nasty.

The sort of joke people make because the alternative is admitting how depressing the situation actually is.

Stain is funny because Stain is a mess, and because he knows perfectly well that everyone else knows it too.

A DETECTIVE WHO HAS ALREADY LOST

Most detective stories begin with somebody competent.

Even the damaged ones generally possess some extraordinary gift which compensates for their personal catastrophe.

They drink too much, but they are brilliant.

They cannot sustain a relationship, but they notice the one microscopic clue nobody else sees.

They are impossible to work with, but by God they get results.

Stain has no such contractual guarantee.

He has been diminished by time and by his own decisions.

The interesting question is whether competence can come back once somebody has spent long enough pretending not to possess it.

Can a man who has deliberately stopped caring start again?

Would he even want to?

And if the answer turns out to be yes, what does that say about the comfortable little ruin he has made of the rest of his life?

A serious case is inconvenient in ways paperwork never manages.

THE NAME DOES QUITE A LOT OF WORK

Stain.

It is hardly heroic branding.

Something left behind.

Something difficult to remove.

Evidence that something happened even after somebody tried to clean it up.

That suits him.

Stain is not the gleaming ideal of the police procedural. He is what years on the job, disappointment, booze and institutional entropy have left behind.

He has soaked into the place.

Everybody would probably prefer to replace him, but getting him completely out might involve redecorating.

The nickname—or name, depending on how charitable you are feeling—also tells you what sort of crime story this is before anything actually happens.

This world has grime under its fingernails.

THIRTY-ONE MINUTES

Dead & Gone is short.

Deliberately so.

The audiobook runs for approximately 31 minutes, making it closer to an old pulp short story, radio piece or television episode than a sprawling detective novel.

That gives it a useful immediacy.

You meet Stain.

His comfortable failure is interrupted.

The case arrives.

Things move.

There is no requirement to spend fifteen hours learning the organisational structure of the station before anybody discovers a body.

This is crime fiction for a commute, a walk, a lunch break or the period in the evening when you want a complete story rather than the first three chapters of something you will resume next Thursday.

Short fiction has always suited crime particularly well.

Get in.

Establish the bastard.

Give him a problem.

See what he does.

READ BY THE AUTHOR

The audiobook is both written and narrated by James Desborough.

That gives the performance a slightly different quality from handing the manuscript to an unrelated reader.

The rhythm, sarcasm and emphasis come from the person who wrote them.

The pauses are where they were meant to be.

The contempt lands where it was aimed.

And Stain's particular mixture of indifference, cynicism and reluctant engagement does not need to be reverse-engineered from the page by somebody encountering him for the first time in a recording booth.

This is a straight, unabridged reading of the story in English.

No adaptation.

No compressed “audio edition”.

No missing passages.

The whole sordid little business.

CRIME FICTION ABOUT GETTING OLD

There is another thing underneath Stain's alcoholism and professional collapse.

Age.

Not old age in the pension-book sense, necessarily, but the point in a career where the future has become noticeably shorter than the past.

There was a version of Stain who expected things from life.

The current version mostly expects retirement.

That makes the arrival of a serious case irritating in a deeper way.

It threatens the story he has been telling himself.

If he really is useless, then fine. He can carry on drinking and waiting for the calendar to solve his employment problem.

If he is not useless, matters become more complicated.

Then he has choices again.

Responsibilities.

Possibly even standards.

There are few things more disruptive than discovering you still have standards after carefully lowering them for years.

PAST GLORIES

Stain survives partly on the credit of things he did before the story begins.

That is another small cruelty.

Past success can become a trap.

It proves you were once capable while providing no guarantee that you still are.

Colleagues remember.

You remember.

Sometimes people who were not there remember, which is even worse because their version has improved in the telling.

Stain's response has been to retreat from the comparison.

Do less.

Expect less.

Eventually everybody adjusts.

Then this case lands in front of him and the comparison becomes unavoidable.

The man he is now is about to discover whether the man he used to be has genuinely disappeared.

NOT A GREAT MAN

Stain is not secretly presented as a saint suffering nobly beneath a rough exterior.

He really is lazy.

He really is unreliable.

He really has allowed himself to decay.

His colleagues have reasons for thinking poorly of him.

That is what gives the possibility of change any bite.

A redemption story becomes rather pointless if the protagonist turns out never to have done anything requiring redemption.

Stain has made a mess.

The story begins after the mess has become normal.

What happens next depends upon whether one unwanted piece of real police work is enough to disturb it.

THE AUDIO VERSION

This recording was released in 2016, following the original publication of the story in 2013.

The audiobook is unabridged, in English, and runs for roughly 31 minutes.

It is written and read by James Desborough and published by Postmortem Studios.

The original prose edition has also circulated digitally as Stain: Dead & Gone, where it is classified as crime, mystery and thriller fiction.

So if you have somehow reached this point while worrying that STAIN might be an experimental role-playing supplement about persistent upholstery damage, relax.

This one is fiction.

Crime fiction.

There are no saving throws.

WHAT YOU GET

This digital product contains:

• STAIN – Dead & Gone, complete and unabridged

• Written by James “Grim” Desborough

• Narrated by James Desborough

• Published by Postmortem Studios

• English-language recording

• Approximately 31 minutes running time

• Digital audiobook download

The original short story dates from 2013; this audio edition followed in 2016.

It is brief enough to listen to in one sitting and complete enough to actually finish before whatever miserable journey you put it on for has ended.

DEAD & GONE

Stain wants to be left alone.

He wants uncomplicated work, undemanding colleagues, sufficient alcohol and retirement to arrive without anybody noticing him in the meantime.

Then somebody hands him a case that matters.

Which means he now has to confront something he has been successfully avoiding for years.

The possibility that he might still care.

STAIN – Dead & Gone is short, sour British crime fiction about a copper everyone has written off, including himself, and the serious case inconsiderate enough to test that judgement.

Thirty-one minutes.

One washed-up detective.

One last flicker of professional pride.

That should be more than enough trouble for anyone.