The Brentford Trilogy
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The Brentford Trilogy is a series of five novels by writer Robert Rankin. They humourously chronicle the lives of a couple of drunken middle-aged layabouts, Jim Pooley and John Omally, who confront the forces of darkness in the environs of West London, usually with the assistance of large quantities of beer from their favourite public house, The Flying Swan, which is a fictionally quintessential British public house on a par with George Orwell's Moon Under Water, another famous fictional and idealised drinking place.
Amongst other characters are such gems as their mentor, Professor Slocombe, who is no slouch in the area of the magical arts himself, Neville the part-time barman, Small Dave the Postman, and Old Pete.
The novels in this series are as follows:
- The Antipope (1981) - Pooley and Omally take on the resurrected Pope Alexander VI the last Borgia pope.
- The Brentford Triangle (1982) - Pooley and Omally thwart an alien invasion of Earth.
- East of Ealing (1984) - Pooley and Omally are forced to deal with a high-tech Satanic takeover of Earth by way of barcoding the entire population.
- The Sprouts of Wrath (1988) - The unlikely decision to site the next Olympic Games in Brentford threatens to disrupt Pooley and Omally's way of life.
- The Brentford Chainstore Massacre (1997) - As the millennium comes early for Brentford, Dr. Steven Malone finds a way to clone Jesus from the Turin Shroud, he decides to make one for each of the world's major religions.
Two of Rankin's other novels feature Pooley and Omally, but are not part of The Brentford Trilogy;
- Nostradamus Ate My Hamster (1996) - A movie prop-house worker finds a way to put old stars back on the silver screen. Over the course of the book, he learns of the legends of Pooley and Omally and sets out in search of The Flying Swan.
- Web Site Story (2002) - Set in the year 2022, Pooley and Omally have long since passed into the myths and legends of Brentford lore. As people start vanishing into thin air in Brentford, the staff of the Brentford Mercury investigate.