Way of the Infidel

Way of the Infidel is a dark drama driven by murder and suicide in the Arabian desert, and by flashes of humour that lighten the bleakest hours.
When, and how, an infidel dies in the desert is not a question of health or chance: the exact moment and manner of his death has become a gambling sport for his dissolute recruiters back at The Royal Lancaster Hotel, Westminster. The enticing incident is the fate of an Irishman who has been in the desert two long years and is now ready to die, but he cannot decide on the wording of the suicide note he would like to send home. He seeks help from his new neighbour, a literary Englishman, who eventually gives him a rough borrowing from the suicide of Thomas Hardy's Mayor of Casterbridge. To the Englishman's vague surprise, the Irishman kills himself a fortnight later.
Other deaths follow, and the Englishman toughens up. "We are only men of the desert here. Not families. We do not care about each other and only a fool would pretend anyone cares back home. Sending the dollars back is all." He has the measure of it, but such stoicism means the grim forces of the desert - deprivation, dissolution, despair - that broke the Irish infidel do not overcome him in the same way. This is not good news because if he doesn't oblige the gamblers at The Royal Lancaster by actually killing himself, he must be taken into The Empty Quarter where his suicide will be faked. At which point another relative newcomer, a misanthropic, washed up Oxford gay, whose life has always revolved entirely around reading poetry, becomes suspicious about all the accidental deaths and suicides going on around him, and looks up from his Everyman Edition of The Collected Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins to see what on earth all the fuss is about. We follow his earnest attempts to unravel and forestall the murderous corruption before his own 'suicide' or execution is due, but such attempts naturally bring that date forward, and the bet is on: can he outwit his executioners?