Interview with John Donoghue, author of Police, Lies & Alibis
Police, Lies & Alibis is the true story of a year in my life as a front line response police officer, highlighting the funny, interesting and bizarre. The book takes you on patrol with me and answers those questions that you always wanted to ask… and others that never even crossed your mind! What genre is it? We absolutely loved the anecdotes in your last book Police, Crime & 999 (interview here). Can you tell us one of the stories from this book? After a hard night’s graft stealing metal from an electricity sub-station, one such criminal, no doubt ecstatic with his haul, decided to answer the call of nature before he left, and urinated at the scene. Unfortunately, he directed his stream onto the station’s transformer, causing a power cut to over 2,000 homes in Sandford, and ‘permanently disfiguring’ himself in the process. He was very easy to locate, as he was the only person in the hospital with smoke coming from his head and a penis that looked like an overdone sausage on a barbeque. He was arrested and charged for the second time that night. That’s really funny. We needn’t have feared that the standard of your humour would’ve dropped between books! One man called to report that someone had stolen his idea. Another rang the police because a kitten was following her. That’s crazy. None of these stories are made up, are they? Do you need permission to tell them? How do you maintain the privacy of the people you talk about? Tell us a little more about yourself. My first book, ‘Shakespeare My Butt!’ covers my time in the military, both navy and army… and then getting a dog and travelling around the bizarre named places in Great Britain (places like Pity Me, Wetwang, No Place, Twatt etc). It’s been described as ‘Bill Bryson on magic mushrooms’. The next book, ‘Police, Crime & 999’ was about my first year as a response officer. ‘Police, Lies & Alibis’ picks up where that left off – although both can be read as standalone books in their own right. How can we follow you on social media? ..and I have a Facebook page: www.facebook.com/PoliceCrime999 Do you have a website? What’s next? On this basis, I don’t think it will be long before I’ve got enough for volume three! We know we’re acting like an addict who doesn’t know when to stop, but one more anecdote… please. Intelligence about the illicit activity of a group of disillusioned college students allowed us to foil a plot to bring panic and mayhem to Sandford town centre on a busy Saturday afternoon. It appeared that an unusual level of interest in the new batch of piglets at the local farmer’s market had triggered suspicion. Word got back to us and we investigated further. A student was brought in, lightly grilled, and eventually cracked, revealing the details of the operation. The concept was inspired and its application was meticulously planned. It’s such a shame that I didn’t get to see the intended result. |
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