title: Once in a Blue Moon (short story collection)
text: # Once in a Blue Moon (short story collection)
  
  Once in a Blue Moon (2003) is the second collection of short stories by Magnus Mills. As in his novels, each is told by an unnamed narrator :
  
  * "Once in a Blue Moon" in which the narrator acts as negotiator in an armed siege between the police and his mother.
  * "The Good Cop" in which he is interrogated by one or possibly two identical policemen.
  * "They Drive by Night" in which he is picked up as a hitch-hiker by a large lorry in which he sits in the noisy cab between the driver and his mate and attempts to make sense of the conversation.
  * "Screwtop Thompson" in which he is a child and receives as a present "Screwtop Thompson" a toy whose head unscrews and which came in several guises. The narrator chose a policeman but received a schoolmaster....without a head.
  
  The stories also appear in the later collection, Screwtop Thompson, published in 2010 by Bloomsbury Press.
  
  