In the 2003 novel Yellow Dog, Xan Meo is set upon by two men in a pub who cosh him over the head: “Like the statue of a fallen tyrant, he crashed sideways into the damp paving, and lay still.” Meo is a writer and actor whose late father was a dangerous gangster; the attack is in revenge for Meo naming an old associate of his father in print. Meo survives, though the injury leaves him with an altered personality. Where he was previously a conscientious husband and father, now he is a chip off the old block.
While Meo languishes in hospital, King Henry IX – who is struggling to conceal his boredom with the job – is informed that images of his 15-year-old daughter in the bath are in circulation. And Clint Smoker, star reporter and gossip peddler at the tabloid newspaper the Morning Lark, gets an unexpected tipoff.
