Alexander Clifford has staged a Benjamin Button for his readers … The Foreign Desk focused on Henry Henderson’s present-day career, with the death of his boss, Mylocent Winecroft, leaving him the owner of The Frame. Now, in The Very Foreign Desk, we see how Henry became a foreign correspondent early in his career after angering Winecroft, who was angling for a knighthood until Henderson, aka Kenneth Zenith, wrote a gossipy story about a minor royal’s fit of pique in a hotel. For that grave sin, Henry is banished to Morocco, where he meets strange Englishmen, encounters mysteriously intuitive fortune tellers, buys monkeys, typewriters, and rugs destined for London, and witnesses a malicious government operation go bust. He also picks up a wife and son along the way, and in the end they’re all happily ensconced back in England, where Henry can return to abusing his liver and writing fanciful stories with just the slightest bit of truth for The Frame.