is very ill, with Louie having to support her in a nursing home on the low earnings of an honest, small town PI. To facilitate this he now lives in a caravan, and has moved his office from the increasingly gentrified Canticle Street to 22/1b Stryd-Y-Popty. Alternative universe culture Casual violence is a part of these books; Louie is tortured, and helps torture people, sometimes aiding police chief Llunos. The mayor is corrupt and unfaithful to his wife, so the police have some leverage for their attempts; unfortunately so do the gangsters. A technique known as 'Welsh roulette' is a favoured interrogation technique, where the number and colour of where the ball lands on the wheel determines what colour 'jack' you are hit with, and how many times (33 red was enough to make Harri Harries give in). As per the Chicago style, people wash up dead on the shore, and some receive concrete boots, or are buried in concrete foundations (hence the ironic saying "this town is built on honest men"). The local prostitutes are usually girls who came to try their hand at modelling, but, as this is Wales, they only get the knitting patterns and pictures in traditional Welsh dress for the lids of fudge boxes ("treadle trollops"). Another diversion from real Aberystwyth is the thriving "What The Butler Saw" movie industry, previously under the control of the Druids. Prostitutes wear stovepipe hats all the time, although very little else - this is a very sly look at traditional Welsh culture. Politically Aberystwyth is run by a non-democratically elected mayor, who is given leave to act by the gangsters. Outside Aberystwyth the government of the United Kingdom is assumed, but not confirmed, to be similar to the real system; Wales and England are not independent states, so presumably this universe had 'The Act of Union' as well. Notably Wales retains a Foreign Legion, (referred to by Louie as "the only real military") which fought the Patagonian War, and had sufficient autonomy to have sponsored the 'Ysbyty Ystwyth' Experiment into neural reprogramming. In Don't Cry For Me Aberystwyth it is revealed that there is also a division of 'Welsh Intelligence', albeit run on the cheap (having devised the 'pie man' style of surveillance) who are running black ops against Mossad (again, on the cheap) to cover up Welsh errors during the Patagonian War. O levels and a grant