Crime Writers and Other Animals

by Simon Brett

  The agent, aware that in Neither One Thing Nor The Other he had a fashionable and marketable commodity, suggested an extreme solution to the problem. The author should send a copy of his manuscript to Sylvia/Sandra and ask her to give a written undertaking that she would not take any action if the book were published. They had nothing to lose; it was worth a try.

  Sylvia/Sandra was not for nothing the daughter of a solicitor. Now married to another solicitor, she was appalled by the manuscript and announced her firm intention to put an immediate injunction on the work if it was ever scheduled for publication.

  Another gloomy Bertorelli’s lunch, and Carlton Rutherford returned to another year’s rewriting. In his new version, the Sylvia/Sandra character was virtually erased from the text. The dynamics of the novel were somewhat weakened by this alteration, but at least Neither One Thing Nor The Other could now be published without fear of litigation.

  But a new shadow stretched over the 1961 Bertorelli’s lunch at which Carlton Rutherford handed over his newly sanitized manuscript to Dashiel Loukes. The Sunday papers that week had been full of rave reviews for Chips On The Elbow, a first novel by a hitherto-unknown author, Bartlett Mears.

  This was a work of searingly fashionable nihilism, the story of Ted Retford, a working-class genius, son of a milkman in Stockport, who struggled, against the odds of misunderstanding parents and virginity-hugging girls, all the way up to university. The book contrived to pillory traditional educational values, but what distinguished it from the novels of the other voguish ‘angry young men’ was that it told the story with a sense of humour.

  According to the Sunday Times, ‘It is spiced with a refreshing wit, and, whereas other contemporary novelists have used their tongues to lash outdated institutions, Mr Mears keeps his firmly – and wisely – in his cheek. Chips On The Elbow contrives to express its own distinctive anger while at the same time deflating the pretensions of the other “angry young men”. In Bartlett Mears the arrival of a major new literary talent must be celebrated.’

  The ensuing events were predictable. When, in 1962, Neither One Thing Nor The Other was finally published, its launch caused only minor ripples on the surface of literary life. The Observer referred to ‘yet another whining catalogue of the ways in which the working class misunderstands the hypersensitive artist in its midst’, and the Spectator even spoke of ‘a self-regarding diatribe in the manner – but without the wit – of Bartlett Mears’.

  All this was gall and wormwood to Carlton Rutherford – particularly because he knew he had finished his novel before Bartlett Mears had even started his.

  Another spur to fury was the discovery, from the deluge of newspaper profiles, radio and television interviews of the new genius, that Bartlett Mears was not even the genuine article. He was not the son of a milkman in Stockport, but of a bank manager in Guildford. He had been educated at a minor public school and – of all places – Oxford University.

  Chips On The Elbow had not been written in the light of bitter experience, but as a patronizing satire by a Southerner on the kind of life that Carlton Rutherford had led.

  Given such a start, it was perhaps not surprising that the relationship between the two writers should end in murder.

  The reception of their first books set the pattern for the future. Carlton Rutherford, having made a borehole into it in Neither One Thing Nor The Other, continued to mine the rich seam of his own childhood hardship and consequent feelings of alienation. The heroes of his subsequent novels were not all called Bob Grantham, but they all were Bob Grantham. Or, to put it another way, they all were Carlton Rutherford.

  However, the vogue for gritty Northern realism passed. Other authors moved on to new subjects. Only Carlton Rutherford continued to produce the same tales of unrecognized genius. And, in an ironically self-fulfilling prophecy, his genius was recognized less and less with each succeeding book.

  The novels, laborious to write, became even more laborious to read. Those reviewers who had found promise in Neither One Thing Nor The Other found it thereafter in decreasing measure, and eventually applied their ultimate destructive sanction – by not reviewing Carlton Rutherford’s books at all.

  Dashiel Loukes, initially such a champion of his author’s cause, also proved a fair-weather friend. Through the sixties the agent grew fatter and more sleek, as he gathered under his banner an ever-increasing troop of ever-more-popular novelists. His early commitment to what he had described to Carlton Rutherford as ‘really sensitive literary fiction’ gave way in his priorities to the pursuit of the dollar.

  Publishing changed, going through yet another of those recurrent attempts to shake off its image as the last refuge of a gentleman and prove it really is a hard-nosed commercial business. This involved, among other economy measures, the shedding of a large number of middle-list ‘literary novelists’.

  The British film industry began to disappear. The vogue for films of the type that might have offered Carlton Rutherford hope, Saturday Night and Sunday Morning or A Kind of Loving, gave way to breathlessly trendy reflections of Swinging London, which in turn gave way to nothing.

  Dashiel Loukes, fatter but still as sharp, trimmed his sails accordingly. He began to specialize in cold-war thrillers, which offered possibilities of lucrative American film deals.

  Carlton Rutherford became more and more a dinosaur in the agent’s stable of fleet-footed winners.

  The crisis came in 1967. Dashiel Loukes was unable to find any publisher willing to take on the latest novel, in which Bob Grantham (by now named Sid Doncaster and working as a novelist) had another disastrously unconsummated love affair and suffered from writer’s block.

  For Carlton Rutherford, though it still continued to strain constipatedly off the typewriter, the writing was on the wall.

  His agent broke the news in a pub one evening after work. Carlton Rutherford no longer justified the expense of a lunch. Indeed, had the author not insisted on a face-to-face meeting, Dashiel Loukes would have made the perfunctory severance by telephone.

  (As things turned out, though, the encounter was not without its uses for the agent. He was at the time in the throes of a very heavy affair with an editor from Hamish Hamilton. Telling his wife he had to meet ‘that dreary old bellyacher Carlton Rutherford’ gave him the perfect alibi. So long as he kept the actual meeting brief – which he ensured that he did – Dashiel Loukes efficiently managed to carve out two hours of uninterrupted bliss between the editor’s satin sheets in Notting Hill.)

  Such categorical obliteration of his hopes might have turned a less resilient author away from the literary life for good, but it did not have that effect on Carlton Rutherford. Partly, he was made of sterner stuff; and partly, his doctorate on George Gissing having been abandoned some years before, there was nothing else he could do.

  So Carlton Rutherford set about constructing something which a surprisingly large number of other literary folk have managed – a career as a writer that does not involve the publication of books. He gave lectures on the theory and practice of writing. He attended seminars and symposia on writing. He joined writers’ committees. He wrote reviews of an increasingly waspish nature, deploring the decline of British letters since . . . well, since his own books had been regarded as publishable.

  And, of course, he taught creative writing courses.

  In spite of all these activities, he still found time to go on writing his own novels, which charted further the conspiracy of an unfeeling and philistine world against Bob Grantham.

  And he lived in daily anticipation of a change in the fickle tastes of the literary marketplace. The revived career of Barbara Pym in the late seventies prompted hopes for a similar rediscovery of Carlton Rutherford. When these were unrealized, he began increasingly to rely on thoughts of posthumous acclaim like that accorded to Gerard Manley Hopkins.

  And when such thoughts proved inadequate to check his spleen, Carlton Rutherford comforted himself with fantasies of revenge on the man who
had blighted his entire career. Bartlett Mears.

  It might have been easier for him if Carlton Rutherford could have been unaware of his rival’s activities, but the career of Bartlett Mears continued to maintain the high profile initiated by the success of Chips On The Elbow.

  Mears, unlike Rutherford, had not allowed himself to be trapped into rewriting the same book time and again. Each of his publications was different from the last, each one attacked a new target, and in each the author’s wit was more venomous. The books themselves did not get better – indeed, they undeniably got worse – but they did get reviewed.

  And they got talked about. Bartlett Mears had an instinct for subject matter that would prompt controversy. His books gave rise to passionate love and passionate hatred in equal measure, but they always gave rise to some reaction. Each new publication was derided as evidence of a sad falling-off in the author’s former talents, as each one made its inexorable way into the bestseller lists.

  It was impossible to be unaware of Bartlett Mears.

  He became a media pundit, never far from the centre of literary debate. His opinion was sought on every innovation. His reactions were frequently ill-considered and bad-tempered – sometimes even infantile – but they were always quotable. His favourite weapon was inadequately informed blanket condemnation. He genuinely did not care what people thought about him, and as a result, whether with relish or disgust, people thought about him a great deal.

  The profile of Bartlett Mears’ domestic life was equally high. Private Eye would have been lost without him.

  A few well-publicized affairs with glamorous literati preceded a very public divorce from his pre-celebrity wife. More well-publicized affairs preceded his very public courtship of, and marriage to, the dauntingly attractive and intelligent novelist and critic Mariana Lestrange, another potent magnet for gossip columnists and press photographers.

  The stormy course of this marriage, its public rows, separations and ultimate collapse in a spitting crackle of recrimination were known well outside the literary world – even in households where nothing was read more taxing than the Sun. Bartlett Mears’ subsequent vituperative attacks on his ex-wife and general misogyny added further fuel to the blaze of his publicity.

  And all this before one even mentioned the drinking.

  Bartlett Mears had started his literary life as an enfant terrible and stayed terrible long after he had relinquished all possible right to be called an enfant.

  He was a selfish, drunken loudmouth of diminishing talent, with the physical allure of a warthog, the tact of a rhinoceros, the morals of a sewer rat.

  And the public loved him for it.

  The more he abused them, the more restaurants he was banned from, the more television programmes he appeared on incapable through drink, the more the public loved him.

  Try as he might – and after a while he didn’t try that hard – Carlton Rutherford could not be unaware of Bartlett Mears and his latest outrage.

  Soon, rather than trying to escape references to his rival, the less successful writer was positively seeking them out.

  He was well placed to do so. He moved in the same literary world – albeit on its fringes – as Bartlett Mears. The two were frequently in the same room – in restaurants, at book launches, publishers’ parties, writers’ seminars, newspaper offices – and Carlton Rutherford witnessed many of the famous author’s more spectacular misdemeanours.

  All of these he chronicled in a notebook, which over the years became a series of notebooks. Soon, in addition, he started building up scrapbooks of newspaper cuttings, and after a while began the practice of soliciting scurrilous gossip about his rival whenever the opportunity arose. So extreme was Bartlett Mears’ general behaviour that such opportunities arose frequently. All this adversarial anecdotage was also punctiliously recorded.

  Gradually, over thirty years, was built up an exhaustive archive of misbehaviour.

  There was no doubt that Carlton Rutherford had got all the dirt on Bartlett Mears.

  It was early in 1991 that the idea came to him, and he was immediately impressed by its simplicity and wholeness.

  He rang Dashiel Loukes the same day. ‘There’s a project I want to put to you.’

  The agent, who thought he had permanently shaken off Carlton Rutherford some twenty years before, was instantly evasive. He was very busy, he had all the authors he could cope with, the current state of publishing was too depressing for him to offer any hope to another saga of North Country misunderstanding.

  ‘Ah, but what I’m talking about now is non-fiction,’ Carlton Rutherford announced triumphantly.

  ‘Well, the state of the non-fiction market is not a lot more encouraging at the—’

  ‘Come on, we must meet and talk about the idea. It’s a sure-fire commercial proposition.’

  Dashiel Loukes tried valiantly to escape, but eventually succumbed to a meeting. He suggested the author should come to his Mayfair office the following Thursday at eleven-thirty, an appointment whose timing proclaimed ‘not only am I not offering you lunch, but also I am having lunch with someone considerably more important than you’.

  ‘What I’m suggesting,’ Carlton Rutherford pronounced, once he was safely ensconced in the agent’s office, ‘is a biography of Bartlett Mears.’

  Dashiel Loukes looked up, his face purple from its daily marinade in the good wines of the Garrick and the Groucho. Time had treated his business kindly. Three of his espionage authors were now international bestsellers, and his principal daily task was to sit and work out his percentage of their money as, unprompted, it came rolling in.

  ‘An official biography?’ he asked.

  ‘No, no,’ Carlton Rutherford replied slyly. ‘An extremely unofficial biography.’

  ‘Hm . . .’

  ‘You can’t deny that Bartlett Mears is the kind of person the public wants to read about.’

  ‘I’m not denying that. It’s a matter of what they want to read about him. A literary biography of a living author’s bound to be a minority sale.’

  ‘I’m not talking about a literary biography of Bartlett Mears. I’m talking about a scurrilous biography. I’ve got all the dirt,’ Carlton Rutherford concluded smugly.

  Dashiel Loukes was thoughtful. ‘It’s actually not such a bad idea . . .’ he conceded.

  The author smiled.

  ‘Trouble is . . .’

  ‘What?’

  ‘You, Carlton, I’m afraid.’

  ‘What? At the absolute lowest, I’m a perfectly competent writer.’

  ‘I know, but your name’s not . . .’

  ‘Not what?’

  ‘Not sexy.’

  ‘I don’t see what sex has got to do with it,’ said Carlton Rutherford, who was always embarrassed by the subject.

  ‘Look, for a project like this – which, as I say, is actually not a bad idea – if I’m going to sell it to a publisher, I’d be on much stronger ground if I was selling it on the name of a well-known journalist or—’

  ‘But you don’t want a well-known journalist, you want someone who knows the facts. And I can assure you – I’ve got all the dirt,’ Carlton Rutherford reiterated.

  ‘Hm . . .’ The agent looked at his watch. ‘Got to be off soon, I’m afraid. Tell you what – I’ll have a ring round some publishers this afternoon – see if I get any nibbles – can’t say fairer than that, can I?’

  The author considered the agent could say a lot fairer than that, but was in no position to argue. Meekly he left the office and went home to his flat in Upper Norwood to eat a boiled egg and wait for the phone to ring.

  It rang at a quarter to five. The mellowness of Dashiel Loukes’ voice suggested he had only just returned from lunch. ‘Had a ring round, old boy, like I said I would,’ he announced bonhomously. ‘Got quite a positive reaction to the idea of a book about Bartlett, but sorry, your name didn’t win too many coconuts.’

  ‘How do you mean?’

  ‘I mean there
’s no chance of my getting a commission for this project with your name attached.’

  ‘Oh. But I’m the one who’s got the dirt,’ Carlton Rutherford insisted.

  ‘Maybe. I’m afraid that didn’t seem to carry much weight.’

  ‘So what do you suggest I do?’

  ‘Well, nothing. Nothing you can do, really. Unless, of course, you want to write the whole thing on spec . . .’ The agent’s voice was aghast at the alien nature of his own suggestion. ‘I mean, if you did come up with something really scurrilous, I might not have too much problem placing the completed manuscript. But it’d have to be pretty strong stuff . . .’

  ‘Yes . . .’

  ‘And you’d certainly have to talk to Mariana Lestrange. No book on Bartlett’s going to be complete without a few shovelfuls of shit from her.’

  ‘Hm. Right . . .’ Carlton Rutherford was silent, until an unpleasant thought came into his head. ‘Meanwhile, I suppose, your calls will have planted in a few publishers’ heads the idea of doing a book about Bartlett Mears . . .’

  ‘Possibly, yes . . .’

  ‘My idea of doing a book about Bartlett Mears!’

  ‘Well . . . They could have come up with it on their own . . .’

  ‘No, they couldn’t! They’d never have thought of it if I hadn’t asked you to—’

  ‘Carlton, Carlton . . .’ the agent remonstrated. ‘There is no copyright in ideas. Now you know that as well as I do – don’t you, old boy . . .?’

  It didn’t take Carlton Rutherford long to make his decision. He had no other means of revenge at his disposal. Besides, if he did not publish his findings, nearly thirty years of chronicling the misdemeanours of Bartlett Mears would have been wasted.

  And there was a new spur to action. Now that Dashiel Loukes had spread around London publishers the idea of a book on Bartlett Mears, it was only a matter of time before some suitably ‘sexy’ journalist was commissioned to write one.