Mr. Pin and Mr. Tulip

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Mr. Pin and Mr. Tulip comprise the New Firm, a duo of interloping criminals in the novel The Truth, one of Terry Pratchett's long-running Discworld series of fantasy novels. Their respective fates suggest they are unlikely to appear again.

Mr. Pin (other names unknown) is the brains of the New Firm. In general Mr. Pin makes the plans and decides where they're going to go and what they're going to do, but he is open to suggestions from his partner. Both men can become violent, but Mr. Pin's violence is more directed and instrumental. The background of Mr. Pin is much more vague than Mr. Tulip.

He comes to a rather sticky end when he's impaled by the desk spike of William de Worde in the offices of The Ankh-Morpork Times after being trapped in a cellar with molten lead raining from the ceiling as the building burned. Mr. Pin is then reincarnated into a potato and deep fried.

Mr. Tulip (other names unknown) is something of a contradiction, a remorseless killer with refined soul of a true fine-art connoisseur. He is differentiated from a common criminal by his habit of removing works of art from houses before committing arson, the ability to distinguish between priceless works of art and common forgeries, and an encyclopaedic knowledge of hundreds of years of great artists, artisans and their works. He is the muscle of the New Firm, and though an instinctive killer, recognises Mr. Pin's cognitive skills, and leaves the thinking to him. He also suffers a mild speech impediment, causing him to often insert "—ing" mid-sentence (the suffix of an action verb without the verb itself), possibly a reference to both a certain popular curseword and censorship of said word. Mr. Tulip's past is hinted at being dark and fearful, a place even Mr. Tulip is afraid to remember, but one of the memories he does have of his youth is the belief that as long as you have a potato, you'll be OK when you die. There are some hints that his family suffered from famine and he overheard that if there are potatoes to eat, situation is not hopeless. His belief in this is quite firm, as 'since they've believed it for centuries, it must be right.' He is killed by Mr. Pin near the end of the novel and used for a life raft as molten lead flows around the pair. Unfortunately Mr. Pin also steals his potato shortly before killing him, but Mr. Tulip manages to retain the memory of a potato in the afterlife and Death allows him to reincarnate as a woodworm: the only woodworm to say 'this is —ing good wood!'

One major problem with Mr. Tulip is not that he has a drug habit as such, but that he wants to have a drug habit, and has a tendency to buy and consume anything sold in little brown bags. Unfortunately he also has the ability to unerringly buy from the one man selling oven cleaner or chalk dust amid an entire city of filled with purveyors of illicit narcotics, hallucinogens and stimulants. His primary skill in the New Firm is his apparently unlimited supply of anger, and that he has turned mindless violence into an art form.

The New Firm view themselves as the results of older criminal elements going soft and legitimate, trading in leg breakers for butlers (a reference to the Mob in North America). They have been compared to several criminal duos, including Vincent and Jules from Pulp Fiction, but they are closest to Mr. Croup and Mr. Vandemar from Neil Gaiman's Neverwhere TV series (although their Neverwhere counterparts are considerably less sympathetic characters). In The Art of Discworld, Pratchett explains that the similarity between all these criminal duos amounts to a Law of Narrative.

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