Call Me, I’ll Hide the Body

Jerry Falade’s debut novel, Call Me, I’ll Hide the Body, was sold to Minotaur in a seven-figure deal, but the contract was canceled after it was alleged that the author had used AI to write the book.

This book is a crime thriller narrated by Femi Johnson, a twenty-six-year-old Nigerian chemist whose extraordinary understanding of surfaces, decomposition and chemical reactions has allowed him to develop a profitable second career cleaning murder scenes and disposing of bodies. Femi considers himself a technician rather than a killer: he does not ask why someone died, judge his clients or become emotionally attached to the dead. His job is to remove every physical trace of violence until, as he puts it, the room itself appears to have forgotten what happened there.

The novel begins on Banana Island in Lagos, where Femi has been summoned to the home of a wealthy woman who appears to have stabbed her husband during an argument about his infidelity. The man lies on imported marble with a knife lodged in his chest, surrounded by blood, broken glass and displaced furniture. Femi immediately turns the corpse into a problem of weight, pressure, absorption and timing. Humanising the dead would interfere with the work.