DURHAM LITERATURE FESTIVAL 2000

 

TOBY LITT

Toby Litt was born in 1968 in Bedfordshire. He attended the Creative Writing course run by Malcolm Bradbury at the University of East Anglia, where he won the Curtis Brown Award for most promising student of that year for his collection of short stories. Unusually, these were published immediately afterwards by Secker and Warburg as Adventures in Capitalism.

Beatnicks, his first novel, was published a year later to great critical acclaim. It is currently in development as a full-length feature film.

The first bullet entered the body of my ex-girlfriend, Lily – twenty-six, famous, gorgeous – approximately two inches beneath her left breast. It was Saturday 16 August, 8.37p.m. – a balmy, bare-fleshed evening. Lily and I were sitting opposite each other in the upstairs room of Le Corbusier, a too-fashionable-to-be-fashionable modern French restaurant half-way along Frith Street, Soho.

As the first bullet went into Lily, I turned round to look at the gunman. He was dressed in Dayglo Stretch Lycra. He was wearing a crash helmet, mirror shades and had a pollution-mask over his mouth. He was a bike courier – his hands had a black and silver gun it – and he was shooting the woman I still loved.

That’s how the whole thing started. But as to how it went on from there….

 

‘Corpsing is a first-rate thriller. The best and most important attribute in this genre is construction, and Toby Litt has succeeded in creating a well-rounded and thrilling story.’

Muriel Spark

‘An intense, suspense-filled thriller, CORPSING hooks you immediately. Although essentially an old-fashioned whodunit, it has a dark edge, somewhere between J G Ballard’s CRASH and Alex Garland’s THE TESSERACT – involving a fetishistic obsession with autopsy and bullet penetration.’

Sarah Champion