For much of his career, Kersh wrote lively, ingenious popular shockers — stories like ‘Clock Without Hands’ and ‘The Crewel Needle’ — that shone a gay, garish light about the place without knocking anything over.

Now and again, though, something bubbled up in him –- some fragment of his past, spent in some “abominable little furnished room” — a gnarled lump of irreconcilable residue that he never quite worked out how to scratch.

Meet Pio Busto, landlord, extortionist, dog-lover, drunk on Red Lisbon, “a handful of spoiled human material, crumpled and thrown aside”. (Can you hear it coming yet? It’s a style as distinct as a theme tune, and it’s always recognisably the same material, run through the sprockets again and again, in variation after variation: comedy that’s subversive, savage, uneasy, off-colour, violent.)

Pio Buston’s dog Ouif has just got itself run over. It’s smashed, finished, but Busto can’t bring himself to shoot it — which is where our narrator comes in: “Old yer gun loew-er… Nah, sqeeeeeeze yer trigger–”

Kersh wants his characters to earn our compassion. He’ll nail his monster down until he writhes. We hate him, we hate him, we hate him — and then a moment arrives.

First published in Courier, Spring 1938, under the pseudonym P. J. Gahagan, and collected in The Best of Gerald Kersh, selected by Simon Raven, Heinemann, 1960, and most recently, Faber and Faber, London, 2013