If I'd stopped there, everything would have been fine. But I didn't. Death_or_Bounty has a baddie called Kirk. The main character in The Legend of Shamus McGinty's Gold is O'Brien. The anti-hero in Bad Day in Dirtwood is McCoy and Devine's_Law had a Dax.

As you're a responsible person with a life, you'll be wondering what the connection is. Which is the point of in-jokes. If you get them, fine. If you don't, also fine. But my desire to sneak ever more obscure Star Trek references into my novels grew. I placed a gratuitous 47 into The Last Rider from Hell. And only the saddest of trekkers will appreciate just how much pathetic pleasure that gave me. And it worsened.

In Bad Day in Dirtwood there are two peripheral henchmen, Rock and Big Dawson. And at one point Rock and Big Dawson walk into a saloon together. Not very interesting I know. But if you say Rock and Big Dawson quickly it sounds like Roxanne Biggs-Dawson, the name of the actress who plays Belanna Torres in Voyager. How sad am I? A lifetime of ever sadder homages awaited. And then I did something even sadder than inserting pointless in-jokes.

Shortly after The Legend of Shamus McGinty's Gold appeared in print I typed Shamus McGinty into an Internet search engine just to see where in the Net it'd featured. A Trek site appeared. Bemused, I entered it. Horror ensued. McGinty was a character in a Trek episode. Not only that, it was the worst episode ever made. For anyone sad enough to be interested, it was the Voyager episode Fair Haven, the only episode I've never been able to rewatch, with the holodeck setting of an Irish village which the crew consider authentic, but which contained a group of insultingly stereotypical characters who would make The Quiet Man's cast seem ruggedly realistic. And in which Janeway risks the life of her real-life crew to save the fictional holodeck characters. I shiver just thinking about it.

But in that mess there is apparently someone called Seamus McGinty. I didn't consciously plan to give him that name, but perhaps sub-consciously my method of allocating names led to this disaster. I hung my head with shame. And rightly so. Forever I will be the author of an otherwise good book with a terrible name emblazoned on the front cover. Either way, that very day, Dax Randall in Devine's_Law became Max Randall and I vowed never, ever again to inflict in-jokes on the reading public.

Well...