The pounding spirit of the gonne flowing up Vimes’ arms met the armies of sheer stone-headed Vimesness surging the other way. Coppers didn’t, as a rule. It wasn’t that they were less prone to commit crimes, it was just that the crimes they committed tended to be so far above the normal level of criminality that they were beyond the reach of men with bad boots and rusting mail. The service itself was going to be performed by the Dean, who had carefully made one up; there was no official civil marriage service in Ankh-Morpork, other than something approximating to “Oh, alright them, if you really must.” Lonely Bachelor Pad: Carrot and Angua discover that Captain Vimes lives in a one-room undecorated apartment with no furnishings but a bed. He puts all his disposable income into the Watch Widows and Orphans fund. Pratchett’s books are always great fun, filled with wit, satire and wise insights into those creatures called human beings, in a broad manner of speaking — which is to say, including dwarfs, trolls, ghouls, and just a whole lot of sentients. Pratchett never wrote a bad novel.

Subverted by Carrot: even after it has become personal, he still believes "personal isn't the same as important." In 2008, Harper Children's published Terry's standalone non-Discworld YA novel, Nation. Terry published Snuff in October 2011. Crowd Song: Referenced. Carrot could make one happen if he tried, while anyone else would wind up as another stain on the street.Lord Rust here is shown as one of the more cynical and intelligent of Ankh-Morpork's nobles. In Jingo by contrast he's presented as Too Dumb to Live, while in Monstrous Regiment he's about halfway between the two. By the time of Snuff, Rust is elderly, wheelchair-bound, facing reality square on and accepting Vimes has a perfect right to arrest his son for serious crime: it could be said he gets a degree of humility in his final years. Drunk with Power: Detritus, a little too high on the thrill of deputizing trolls, tells a freshly deputized dwarf to shut up. In front of a crowd of angry dwarfs. Fortunately, Carrot is able to stop things getting violent. An Assassin tells Vimes "Your uniform doesn't scare me". Vimes agrees that it's not a scary uniform, and calls over Carrot and Detritus. "Now these, I think you'll agree, are scary uniforms." There's a similar exchange in Police Academy III between Mahoney and a cabbie, where he calls over Hightower for the same effect. Gaspode tells Angua that other dogs don't bother him because "I got the Power". When he is eventually forced to use it against Big Fido's minions, this turns out to be The Power of Speech, something Hidden in Plain Sight all along because we always knew Gaspode can speak like a human; to dogs, this is effectively a Compelling Voice.

Bothering by the Book: Carrot's talent for this first begins to be really apparent here, as well as his way with Exact Words. Canine Confusion: Used in-universe, when Big Fido urges dogs to rise up and tear out the throats of their human masters, preaching the superiority of wolves in the wild. Angua, who's actually met wolves, knows it's only a delusion. Big Fido, being a small wimpy dog with a bad case of flatulence and crazy eyes, is essentially Adolf Hitler as a Psycho Poodle. Dogs are also apparently capable of being cowed by a human voice (like Gaspode's), especially someone telling them they've been a Bad Dog. In one of the other universes, "Corporal Carrot became Sergeant Carrot and, in the fullness of time, died in uniform aged seventy in an unlikely accident involving an anteater." And a localised hurricane painted the Watch-House pastel (as well as fixing a window and doing some other odd jobs around the place). Beware the Nice Ones: This is the first book to insinuate that there may be just a little something more to Carrot's personality than meets the eye. See also Just Between You and Me below. Firearms Are Revolutionary: It's revealed that the Disc's greatest inventor came up with a revolver rifle, which briefly terrorizes Ankh-Morpork when it's stolen by an unhinged assassin. Something about the "gonne"'s singular nature and sheer killing power turned it into an Evil Weapon capable of possessing its wielders, and it actively enforces Fantasy Gun Control by killing an artisan that was trying to duplicate it. When the thing is finally defeated, it's buried forever with a fallen guardsman so that he can have a peerless weapon in the afterlife.The front cover features (from left to right) Cuddy, Detritus, Angua, Carrot, Nobby and Colon. Illustrator Josh Kirby neglected to give Cuddy the dwarf a beard. At the bottom right there is a dog, presumably Gaspode. Disappointing Heritage Reveal: Big Fido the poodle is a canine supremacist who praises the ideal of wolves over civilized dogs. While he never finds out about the real thing, Angua's narration makes it clear he would suffer from this, as real wolves are nowhere near as big or strong as Fido makes them out to be and don't match his highly romanticized concept of the Noble Wolf. In Dec. of 2007, Pratchett disclosed that he had been diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease. On 18 Feb, 2009, he was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II. We get further commentary on how policing can lead to the dehumanization of the very people you’re meant to be protecting, as we watch Detritus start saying things like this about his own people: Red Herring: It turns out Edward d'Eath, despite all the foreshadowing surrounding his unstable mind and, you know, family name, only ever killed one person during the story, and that was quite by accident.