‘Go on.’
I didn’t know that I could say very much more about this, but now that I’d mentioned it I rather liked the idea of quitting my job and using John’s publishing windfall – what was left of it – to stay at home and subsidize my own writing; so I was selling it now and selling it with more than a hint of flattery.
‘After all, you wouldn’t be the first to pull a stroke like this. Shakespeare may have had a similar arrangement with Thomas Nashe when he wrote Henry VI, Part One. Or with George Wilkins when he wrote Pericles. And with Thomas Middleton when he wrote – something else.’ I shrugged. ‘Don’t ask me what. But I rather think Elizabethan theatre was a bit like the modern film industry. With one writer replaced by another at a moment’s notice. Or writers stepping into the breach to help someone out with a first act, or a quick polish. That kind of thing.’
‘You know, that’s not a bad idea, old sport.’ John deliberated for a moment. ‘That’s not a bad idea at all. A bit like Andy Warhol’s factory, in New York.’
‘Precisely. I suppose you might even argue that the Apple Macintosh is the modern equivalent of the silkscreen printing process. A technology that makes for the rapid reproduction and alteration of the basic creative idea.’
Back in the 1980s – and following the famous Ridley Scott 1984 television commercial – every writer coveted a Macintosh computer. John actually owned one; whereas I was making do with a cheaper and certainly inferior Amstrad; but even that seemed a vast improvement on the IBM Selectric typewriter which is what they gave us to use at work.
‘How much would you want? To do what you’ve just described.’
‘Let’s see now.’ I shook my head. ‘Naturally, I’d have to give up work. I mean, to write a whole book in six months – I couldn’t do that and continue to be a copywriter. I mean, we’re talking nine to five here to produce that many words in that amount of time. So it would have to be enough money to allow that to happen.’
‘You were on twenty grand a year when I left.’
‘Twenty-five, now. They gave me an extra five to make up your workload after you left. I’d be taking a risk, of course. Giving up work like that. To do something as chancy as this. If it doesn’t work out then I’m out of a job without the means to pay the mortgage.’
‘You’d really give it up? Come on, Don. You love it. All those nice dolly birds to shag. I sometimes think that’s why you came into advertising, old sport. For the birds.’
I shook my head. ‘That’s bollocks and you know it. I’m fed up with it. Just like you were, John. If I have to write another telly commercial for Brooke Bond Red Mountain coffee I think I will scream. Besides I’ve already shagged all the birds I’m ever going to shag at Masius. They’re wise to my act. I need to move on. But no one at another agency is ever going to take on a copywriter from Masius. We’re like lepers. So, this might just be my ticket out of St James’s Square. I can subsidize my own novel with what I make from writing yours.’
‘I’d have to see a few specimen chapters.’
‘You mean my novel?’
‘I don’t mean your advertising copy. I know how crap you are writing that. David Abbott you’re not, old sport.’
I shrugged. ‘As if I ever gave a damn about writing copy. Look, you don’t need to see my novel. You know I can fucking write. I had that story in Granta, remember?’
‘Oh, yes. I’d forgotten about that.’
‘Unless that is you’re not serious. Because I am.’
‘Of course I’m serious. Writing all day and every day like Henry fucking James is a royal pain in the ass, Don. No wonder authors all look like swots. Did you see that picture of those Best of Young British Novelists? Christ, if that’s what the young ones look like … No, it’s putting the plot together that I enjoy, not typing all day and night like some tragic bespectacled cunt.’
‘I really don’t mind it at all,’ I confessed. ‘I feel like my life has some meaning when I’m in front of the keyboard.’
‘I don’t know how you have the patience.’
‘That’s what Northern Ireland teaches you, John: patience and an appreciation for the quiet life. Whenever I sit down at the typewriter I tell myself, “Count yourself lucky; it’s not the Falls Road.”’
‘So, how much?’ he repeated. ‘That’s the sixty-four-thousand-dollar question. Or not, since I’m not about to pay you anything like that.’
‘Twenty-five grand.’
‘Fuck off. Ten.’
‘I can’t do it for ten. I can’t take the risk. Twenty.’
‘Twelve and a half.’
I shook my head. ‘Fifteen. And with a bonus if the book is a bestseller.’
I could see John doing the maths in his head. ‘Agreed.’
We shook on it and then continued with the minutiae of further negotiations for a while – delivery dates, penalties for failing to meet John’s deadline, bonus payments; then John said, ‘You know if I can make this arrangement with you, Don, there’s no reason I couldn’t make it with someone else.’
‘I’m sure you could find someone cheaper than me, John. Perhaps if you were to put a small ad in the back of Books and Bookmen. Or The Literary Review. Writer in a Hurry Seeks Amanuensis. Must be able to spell “amanuensis” and write bestselling novel to order. Thomas Pynchon need not apply.’
‘No, I didn’t mean that. What I mean is that if I can make this deal with one writer then why not with two? That way I could have two novels being written while I research another story. That’s what I’m good at.’
I shrugged. ‘Why not? Like you said, it’s what Warhol does. I could be your Gerard Malanga.’
‘The question is, who? Who else is there who can write that’s as desperate as you, old sport?’
‘You mean at Masius?’
‘Why not? Everyone who’s any good wants out of St James’s Square one way or the other.’
‘What about Sally?’
‘One of the many pleasures I have enjoyed in leaving Masius is that I will never again have to see or hear Sally van Leeuwenhoek. Or try to spell her fucking name.’
‘Might be useful to have a woman on your team.’
‘No, I disagree. You see, I know my market, old sport, because I’ve researched it very carefully. And before you ask, yes, I paid for a proper research company to carry out some market research and make a report. I’m writing for men; men who want to read books about solidly heterosexual men who think the female eunuch is a fucking mare with a horn on its forehead; who think a problem shared is a fist-fight in a bar. Blokes who grew up thinking that Ian Fleming is a better writer than Christopher Isherwood. Anyway, I never met a woman yet who could write like a man. Did you read The Sea, The Sea by Iris Murdoch? The narrator of that novel is supposed to be a man, but he’s a man who’s interested in curtain fabrics and hence not a real man at all but some daft old bat’s idea of what a man sounds like. Hence he sounds like a complete fucking poof. No, this is a good idea we’ve had here today but no fish, old sport. Besides, I have an idea that we’ll have a lot more fun if we keep this a purely stag do.’
‘All right. How about Paul Cliveden?’
John thought for a moment and then shook his head. ‘He’s queer and therefore similarly disqualified from writing about heterosexual men.’
‘Yes, I’d forgotten about that.’
‘You worry me, sometimes, old sport. How anyone could forget that Paul Cliveden is queer, I have no idea. He makes Quentin Crisp look like Burt Reynolds.’
I thought for another moment. ‘How about Peter Staken-borg?’
‘He failed the copy test, didn’t he?’
‘Yes, although I think it’s to his credit that you thought he wasn’t suitable copywriter material. As I recall it was you who told him there was no shame in not being able to think at the elevated intellectual level required to write a Ribena commercial featuring a talking blackcurrant bubble.’
‘True.’
‘Besides, he got a
degree in English at Oxford. Not only that but I happen to know he’s just started to write his second novel.’
‘The first one having been rejected all round. Yes, that’s right. It was about advertising, wasn’t it? I remember him boring me about it during the D and AD dinner last year. I don’t know why people should think a story about the sad hucksters who work in advertising should be interesting to anyone. The adman as a sort of modern class warrior was already dead and buried when Michael Winner made that crappy film about the business back in the Sixties. What was it called?’
‘I’ll Never Forget What’s’isname.’
‘So what’s the new one about?’
‘He said that it was a comic novel about what it was like growing up in Malawi. It sounds like another Good Man in Africa, I think.’
‘Jesus. I bet Jonathan Cape is just gagging for that. Still, Stakenborg has been absolutely everywhere. Mostly to the sort of fly-blown countries I wouldn’t ever want to go myself. Kashmir, Afghanistan. It might be handy to have someone who knows what some of these ghastly places are actually like. It would save me from having to go. And you’re right. He can write. He wrote those press ads for American Express when Vic Cassel was too pissed to write them himself.’
‘They won an award, didn’t they?’
‘That’s what encouraged him to think he could become a copywriter in the first place.’ John nodded. ‘Okay, okay. Talk to him. See if he’s interested in my idea.’
I smiled and did not try to correct him, which I ought to have done, but back then it didn’t really seem to matter whose idea it was, as neither of us had any idea that a convenient working arrangement between two advertising copywriters for one or two books would result in more than thirty New York Times bestsellers and sales of more than 175 million books. Only James Patterson and J. K. Rowling sell more. These days, whenever the subject of his squad of co-writers comes up in an interview, John always claims that the idea of employing a back-room of ghost-writers was his and his alone; perhaps it’s what C. P. Snow describes in his novel The Sleep of Reason as ‘the hallucinations of fact’. More likely it’s just John being his usual selfish self.
*
The following week I gave in my notice at Masius, and four weeks later I started work on the storyline provided by John for a novel that was published the following year as The Golden Key is Death – the first of five novels featuring Dougal Haddon, an ex-SAS officer turned trouble-shooter and mercenary. For a long time I couldn’t believe my own good luck: to get paid to stay at home all morning and write a book, and still have time and energy enough to spend the afternoon writing my own. Pigs in shit do not feel as good about themselves as I did.
Even before it was published it was clear that John’s new book was destined to be a bestseller – as things turned out it was his first New York Times number one – and almost immediately it was finished I started work on the next plot-driven title. I was already making more money than I would have done if I’d been a going-nowhere copywriter at an agency that was held to be the civil service of advertising. For the first time in a long time I was smiling when I got up in the morning.
Meanwhile, Peter Stakenborg joined John’s new team of writers, followed by a third writer – another ex-copywriter from Ogilvy & Mather called Brian Callaghan – and then a fourth named Philip French, a freelance journalist. Within three years of that lunch at Ormond’s Yard, John Houston employed a team of five writers and was worth more than twenty million pounds. After that John moved first to Jersey for tax reasons – where he met and divorced his second wife, Susan – and then, briefly, to Switzerland, where I believe he still has a house.
In truth, more or less anyone could write the books, so long as they understood a little about pace and structure, and how to write reasonable dialogue; but only John could edit them so they all read the same, uncomplicated way. It’s not what’s written that makes the difference in John’s books, it’s what doesn’t get written. I quickly learned that the writing is just the connective tissue for John’s stories. He’s very well-read and extremely literate and he can write beautifully constructed prose when he wants to, but there’s a simplicity about his books that reminds me of Picasso; you see, before Picasso, artists painted exactly what they saw, but it was Picasso’s genius to know exactly what you could leave out of a picture; it’s the same with John. Knowing what you can leave out of a book is one reason why he’s so successful and why I have such admiration for what he does.
While I think I’m a much better writer than John I have never been particularly good at devising a good story, and in the current publishing market it’s story not fine writing that sells. This is the other reason John is so successful at what he does: he’s the most story-led person I’ve ever met. John once told me that he never goes looking for new plots because they always seem to find him; to that extent they’re like orphans, he says, looking for a good home, or perhaps electrons looking to attach themselves to a vulnerable nucleus. For this reason he never goes anywhere without one of his little Smythson notebooks in which he is forever jotting ideas down – the notebooks even have the word GENIUS printed on the covers in gold letters, and he’s got a whole boxful of them; sometimes he just jots down some things a character might say, or plot-points, but just as often a plot will come to him wholly formed, as if a stork had delivered them to his desk like Dumbo the elephant. John is the kind of person who could find you a good plot from the in-flight magazine on the plane and famously did with one of his earlier novels, The Liberty to Know; incidentally, the film rights on that one were bought by Jerry Bruckheimer for two million dollars.
When she divorced him, John’s second wife alleged that his constant note-taking was a kind of obsessive compulsive disorder; she even alleged that he had stolen some of her own ideas and passed these off as his own intellectual property; but that’s another story.
Somewhere along the line I published my own first novel – Dreams of Heaven on the Falls Road – which limped into print and was quickly remaindered, then forgotten. Which is the fate of most novels, of course, and the normal condition for any writer is to be rejected or to be out of print; this is what I tell myself – that being a published writer is a bit like what Schopenhauer says about life itself: non-existence is our natural condition. Unless, of course, you’re John Houston. Because make no mistake about it, what John Houston does is very rare indeed; to make money by your writing is incredibly difficult. To that extent John Houston is truly one of the greats and the living embodiment of what Andy Warhol meant when he said that good business is the best art.
When John read my novel and noted my disappointment at its cool reception he gave me his own critical reaction, which was a little less F. R. Leavis and a bit more Jack Regan:
‘Forget about it, old sport – that’s my advice. Forget about this and write another; that’s what separates the men from the boys; any dumb fuck can start writing a novel – and they frequently do – but very few can finish writing one; and there are even fewer who can put that novel behind them and start another. The important thing is to learn from your mistakes. My opinion is that your novel is beautifully written and very atmospheric but too often you seem like you’re peeking across your shoulder to see if any of those bloody clever writers you say you admire are paying attention to your nice, pretty sentences. The Martins and the Julians and the Salmans. The trouble is your story doesn’t stay afloat. About halfway through it’s as if you forgot where you put it. It’s almost like you were shagging some bird and even while you were doing it you decided you didn’t want to shag her any more. With your next one you’ve got to work out the story and everything about the story and nothing but the fucking story before you start writing a goddamn word, after which everything becomes subordinate to that. More importantly you have got to learn to tell Martin and Julian and Salman to go and fuck themselves.’
*
Someone’s mobile was ringing out a tune – a piece of tinny piano music I
vaguely recognized. Sergeant Savigny got up from the table and left the half-empty restaurant to answer his portable. I tasted the wine and then frowned, trying to place the clunking melody.
‘You don’t like the wine?’
‘The wine is excellent. No, it’s the ringtone that’s perplexing me.’
‘Irritating, isn’t it?’ said Amalric. ‘It’s the theme from Betty Blue. The sergeant has a thing for Béatrice Dalle.’
I shrugged. ‘That’s easy to understand. She was very beautiful. Whatever happened to her, anyway?’
‘Like all beautiful women, monsieur, she got older. Savigny keeps a copy of the DVD in his suitcase. Always.’
‘That and a novel by John Houston. But then with 140 million books sold, I guess that’s a little less unusual. Statistically speaking. It’s said that one in every thirty books being bought in the world right now is likely to be written by John Houston. Did you know that? And your sergeant certainly fits the standard profile of a John Houston reader.’
‘Is there such a thing?’
‘Oh yes. Every so often Houston commissions a piece of market research into who is reading his books. Impact – that’s the name of the research company that John used – they carry out focus groups and sometimes John insists that the writing team come along and watch what the groups are saying, through a two-way mirror. Which is the way these things are done in an advertising agency. He’ll end up with a report that describes socio-economic profiles of readership, buying habits, income – in the exactly same way that Heinz will try to find out who is buying what soup and why. John has never quite stopped being a successful advertising man. Having read several of those research reports I can probably tell you quite a lot about your sergeant. What is he – thirty-five?’
Amalric nodded. ‘This is fascinating. Please go on.’
‘All right. He buys no more than two or three books a year and rarely ever reads a newspaper, unless it’s free. The chances are that in all the years you’ve known him you’ve never seen him read anything you’d like to read yourself. The one time you looked at the book he was reading you were a bit shocked at how simplistic it was, how short the chapters seemed to be, how small the sentences were. Mostly the sergeant doesn’t have time to read because he thinks of himself as a busy sort of guy – if that’s even possible in a place like Monaco. One time he bought the same book he bought the last time and read half of it before he realized he’d read it already.’