Killer plots

We all love to mock Bond villains for their hilarious ineptitude at killing the hero. The ‘genius’ Dr No has a tarantula placed in Bond’s bed — though as it happens, tarantula bites do not kill humans except via anaphylaxis; he tries to have Bond run off the road, irradiated, and boiled alive in a nuclear cooling tank. Time and again, Bond is in the clutches of Smersh or Spectre or that chap with three nipples, and time and again they pass up the obvious bullet to the head in favour of crowd-pleasing stunts involving sharks, poison–tipped shoes, alligators, and men with giant metal teeth.

Such things would never happen in the real world, we think. Even a halfwit criminal would know to crush a cunning adversary like Bond in the simplest, quickest way possible.

Or would they?

One client of mine, whom I shall call Blofeld, decided to murder his wife.

I do not wish to advise readers as to the best methods for such a crime, but they tend to the prosaic: poison, strangulation, bludgeoning, etc.

Blofeld decided to finish off his missus by firing a homemade, 4ft-long rocket into her car as she drove through a wooded copse on her way home from work.

After painstakingly building his weapon in the shed, he placed it on a custom-built launch frame and angled it towards the road.