A failed philosophy lecturer and a disillusioned small-time criminal find themselves in the same hospital ward and decide to start robbing banks.

Their heists are carried out almost as an afterthought to the conversations between the pair, with the real focus landing on the arguments, digressions, and half-serious theories exchanged between the two as they move from job to job.

Fischer uses the structure of the road story or caper, then steadily empties it of urgency, replacing momentum with thought experiments, jokes, and philosophical riffs that undercut their own authority. The pairing works as a kind of unstable double-act—each character testing the limits of the other’s reasoning, pushing ideas past coherence and into something closer to absurdity. 

Fischer, born in Hungary and raised in Britain, brings a distinctly European intellectual inheritance into a dry, often deliberately anticomic register. Fun, such a good little read.

Paperback, Minerva / Mandarin (1995). Good condition—visible creasing to spine and light wear to covers, binding intact and pages clean.