Book 45: "Don’t Cry for Me Aberystwyth" by Malcolm Pryce

Tinker, tailor, Patagonian sailor, ex-Nazi . . . Hoffman. He's coming to save the townspeople. Hopeman. A false prophet, cut-price Messiah . . . The man they send when the town clock forgets to tick.

When a department store Santa is found dead and mutilated in an Aberystwyth alley, the discovery that he has written the word Hoffman in his own blood causes stirrings in the world of espionage. Someone claiming to be the Queen of Denmark pays private detective Louie Knight to investigate the murder, while Louie's assistant Calamity has got hold of a Pinkerton Detective Agency manual, and decides to investigate the case using their methods. The name Hoffman is linked to a disaster in the Patagonian campaign (Wales' Vietnam), the capture of Adolf Eichmann, and a possible descendant of the Sundance Kid, but no-one knows who Hoffman is and why he has finally decided to come in from the cold. A stuffed collie in Aberystwyth museum seems to be at the centre of the mystery, and the re-release of a film about his exploits in Patagonia raises strong emotions among the disillusioned veterans of that conflict.

A darker tale than the first three books in the series, but equally as funny.

Book 46: "The Day of Creation" by J.G. Ballard

A reverie of great rivers had overwhelmed me, moments marked by the measures of dream and myth. I sat under the canvas awning in the bows of the ferry, as the hours and days slid us through the copper haze that lay over the distant channel of the Mallory.

Mallory is a WHO doctor in the arid African town of Port-la-Nouvelle, which is threatened by the encroachment of the Sahara and an anti-government guerrilla army of General Harare. As well as running a clinic, he has taken charge of a drilling project searching for underground water. When he accidentally uncovers a spring that rapidly develops into a wide river and fills the long-dry lake bed, he is dismayed that it will ruin his drilling project. After initial attempts to stem its flow fail he steals a boat and heads upstream, with his head filled with conflicting dreams of greening the Sahara, and destroying 'his' river at its source, which is now hundreds of miles north of the spring where it first broke through.

This is one of Ballard's books that has a very dream-like feel to it, for the reader as much as for the increasingly crazed characters.