From this week’s issue of the newspaper inside my head:

In what was described by an independent spokesweasel as “a really fucking great precedent for the industry”, the international publisher Penguin today announced that they were offering refunds to anyone who had purchased a copy of George Orwell’s Down and Out in Paris and London, following allegations that the author may have embellished or even lied about the story. Readers who bought the book directly from the publisher will be able to return it for the full purchase price.

Orwell’s graphic account of the hardships of poverty in the inter-war slums of London and Paris has sold millions of copies since its original publication in 1933, but this week the Smoking Enfield 303 website revealed that, far from working “seventeen and a half hours” a day, “almost without a break” in the suspiciously-named ‘Hotel X’, Paris, Orwell was frequently seen gallivanting around London and the Home Counties in an open-topped Gallardi roadster in the company of a number of young women.

To back up its claims, the site highlights an incident in Chapter XVI of Down and Out… in which Orwell claims to be the witness to a murder that took place beneath his hotel window:

I could see the murderers, three of them, flitting away at the end of the street. Some of us went down and found that the man was quite dead, his skull cracked with a piece of lead piping. I remember the colour of his blood, curiously purple, like wine; it was still on the cobbles when I came home that evening, and they said the school-children had come from miles round to see it.

According to the Smoking Enfield, no record for this crime is held in any of the archives of the Paris Gendarmerie or the Police Militaire for the years 1928-30, the years Orwell was resident in Paris, and goes on to suggest that the author might have lifted the incident wholesale from an acquaintance’s lesser-known memoir, Paris Whore Catheter Scene by George Bufy.

Professor Steve Trout, noted academic, told your correspondent that “Close examination of the relevant texts suggests a resemblance between the two, although Paris Whore… was written some years earlier. Not only does it describe a murder in a Paris alleyway, including the tell-tale details of the lead piping and the wine-coloured blood, but it also gives some background details on the author’s colonial childhood in Southeast Asia and his time spent working as a syndicalist pig-breeder in the English shires.”

The late George Orwell, who succumbed to tuberculosis in 1950, defended his work, stating: “I stand by my book, and my life, and I won’t dignify this bullshit with any sort of further response.”

[Sources: 1, 2, and particularly, 3]

[Also, there's some new Short, Short Fiction in the Magazine.]