Anyone who has read the four books I have written about my adventures with ex-Detective Inspector Daniel Hawthorne, may be surprised by this one. Where is Hawthorne? Where am I? What’s going on with the third-person narrative?
None of this was exactly my choice.
More than a year had passed since my play, Mindgame, had been produced, largely trashed by the critics and tucked away in that file marked ‘Unlikely to be revived by the National Theatre’. Was I depressed by what had happened? Not really. If you’re going to spend your entire life writing, you have to accept the possibility of failure and live with it when it arrives. There’s an old saying ‘You’re only as good as your last script’, but that’s not true. You’re only as good as your next one. Writing is all about looking ahead. The worst thing that had happened to me as a result of Mindgame was being arrested for the violent murder of Harriet Throsby, the critic who had given the play its most venomous review. Frankly, of the two of us, I think she came out of it worse.
My agent, Hilda Starke, knew nothing of this. I hadn’t sent her the novel yet and she’d only seen a brief synopsis of Murder at the Vaudeville Theatre, which was my working title. She would certainly be delighted that I had cleared my name, if only because it wouldn’t have been easy to get books out of me if I’d been banged up in Wormwood Scrubs. I’ve never been quite sure if literary agents work for their writers or the other way round. Hilda had already twisted my arm into signing a four-book deal with Penguin Random House, arranging delivery dates that even an AI-powered neural network machine would have had difficulty meeting. Either I’m too weak or I like writing too much, but I always seem to be locked in a room with a ream of A4 while other writers are out and about having a good time.
There had, however, been a development that even Hilda could not have foreseen.
I couldn’t write another murder story for the simple reason that nobody had been murdered. I hadn’t heard from Hawthorne for months.
That’s the trouble with writing what I suppose I must call true crime. When I was working on the television programme Midsomer Murders, nobody so much as blinked if there were four or five homicides in a single episode. Hercule Poirot investigated no fewer than eighty-five mysterious deaths (starting with the one at Styles) during his career. Real life is not like that. There are seven or eight hundred murders a year in the United Kingdom, but most of them aren’t mysteries at all. A fight in a pub. A domestic argument that turns violent. Knife crime. These are all horrible, but nobody wants to read about them. Even journalists find them pedestrian. The police don’t need to call Hawthorne when the killer is sitting in the kitchen with a meat tenderiser in one hand, a bottle of whisky in the other and blood all over the walls.
None of this had occurred to Hilda when she called me unexpectedly, around noon. I was, as usual, in my office in Clerkenwell, listening to the thud of jackhammers and the endless whine of huge industrial drills as the new Crossrail underground was constructed just across the road. Everywhere I looked, there were cranes circling one another like prehistoric beasts deep in conversation. All the activity, the sense of London reinventing itself, only made me feel more isolated, which was one of the reasons I never failed to answer my phone.
‘How are you getting on with the next book?’ the familiar voice barked into my ear.
‘Hello, Hilda,’ I said. ‘Which book are you talking about?’
‘The new Hawthorne. We need the fifth in the series.’
She always called them the Hawthorne books. Everyone did. It was strange the way I did all the work but never got a mention.
‘Why are you asking? We’ve got plenty of time. And I still haven’t finished Murder at the Vaudeville Theatre.’
‘I really don’t like that title. It’s too old-fashioned. Hawthorne has a much better one . . .’
‘When did you see him?’ I had that strange sense of unreality that seemed to have taken over my life from the day I’d met Hawthorne.
‘He called in last week. They want him to appear on the Today programme.’
‘Talking about what, exactly?’
‘Working with you, I suppose.’
Shouldn’t it have been the other way round? I decided not to go there. ‘Why are you asking me about a book I haven’t even started writing?’ I demanded.
‘Because you’ve got to deliver it by Christmas.’
‘Who said that?’
‘Didn’t you read your contract?’
‘I never read my contracts. That’s your job.’
‘Well, I agreed to a December delivery. It’s ahead of the game, but it shows how much confidence they have in you. They want to publish in time for spring.’ I heard a bump and a rustling sound at Hilda’s end, and her voice became distant as she lowered her mobile into her lap. ‘I’ll have a tuna fish baguette, a flat white and a peppermint Aero.’
‘Hilda? Are you ordering lunch?’
She either didn’t hear what I said or ignored it. ‘So when are you going to get started?’ she demanded.
‘I don’t know. I haven’t seen Hawthorne in months. And unless he told you something different, he hasn’t investigated any new cases.’
There was a pause as she digested this.
‘Well, you’ll have to write about an old one,’ she said. ‘Talk to Hawthorne. He must have solved half a dozen murders before he met you. Give it a think, Tony, and get back to me.’
Tony! Was she really calling me that too? I opened my mouth to protest, but she had already hung up.
Several thoughts went through my head.
I had always liked the security of a multiple book deal. It effectively meant that I was being paid for four bites of the cherry. Even if my next book was a disaster, I’d be guaranteed three more. Most writers live with what is known as ‘imposter syndrome’, a chronic fear that at any moment they’ll be found out and their books will be unceremoniously taken off the shelves and pulped, reduced to a milky white substance that will then be reconstituted into new paper and used for somebody else’s book. My deal pushed that possibility further into the future.
The downside was that it tied me to my publisher, making me almost a full-time employee. It committed me to another lorry-load of words, three hundred thousand of them, or maybe even five hundred thousand by the time I’d done second drafts and edits. It was a mountain to climb, and given that Hawthorne hadn’t so much as sent me an email or a text since Harriet Throsby’s killer had been arrested (life in jail with a minimum of twenty-three years), I couldn’t so much as take the first step. It was as if I was suffering from somebody else’s writer’s block.
I flicked on the kettle and considered what Hilda had suggested. An old case . . . a murder that Hawthorne had solved before he had forced his way into my life. It did have some attractions.
It would be much easier to write. All the facts would have been set out, the clues assembled, the killer already known. This would be, for me, a huge relief. I wouldn’t have to follow half a dozen steps behind Hawthorne for several weeks, desperately hoping he would find the solution so that I’d be able to finish the book. I wouldn’t get everything wrong like a real-life Watson or Hastings and nor would I get stabbed . . . as had happened on two occasions. All I would have to do was sit down with Hawthorne, listen to him set out the main beats of the story, examine any case notes he might have, maybe visit the crime scene to get the atmosphere and physical description, and then sit down quietly and write the whole thing in the comfort of my own home.
The timing could hardly be better. Eleventh Hour Films, the television production company run by wife, had just started developing Alex Rider for Amazon TV, but I’d decided not to write the scripts. There were two reasons for this. The first was that I was writing a new book, Nightshade. But I was also thinking of Stormbreaker, the feature film that had been made sixteen years earlier in 2003. The experience of working with a certain Harvey Weinstein, our American producer, had not been an altogether happy one and I thought it might be more sensible to let someone else have a crack of the whip. We’d found a great writer who was about twenty years younger than me: he’d bring his own vision to the character, and although I’d help shape some of the episodes, I would be free to focus on other things.
One of these was a new James Bond novel. Trigger Mortis had come out and had done well, and to my surprise, the Ian Fleming estate had offered me the chance to write a second. My first instinct had been to say no. Bond novels demanded an enormous amount of work: doing the research, getting the language right, avoiding the obvious pitfalls of bringing a 1950s character to life for a twenty-first-century audience with a whole new set of values. I wasn’t even sure I had a second story in me.
Then something had happened. A first line fell into my head. I have no idea where it came from. I sometimes think that all writers are like radio receivers, picking up signals from . . . who knows where? ‘So, 007 is dead.’ It was M talking. One of his agents had been killed, but it wasn’t Bond. This would be an origin story, predating Casino Royale, telling how Bond got his licence to kill, inherited the number and was sent on his first mission. I’m not saying it’s the most brilliant idea anyone’s ever had, but that’s how it works for me. I knew I had to write it.
I was thinking about setting it in the South of France. It would involve the CIA and the true scandal of American involvement with heroin traffickers back in the fifties. I already had some thoughts about the main villain, Jean-Paul Scipio. Fleming had a penchant for physical peculiarities, from Dr No’s contact lenses to Scaramanga’s third nipple. Scipio would be massively, unnaturally obese and that would also play a part in the way he died.
I wasn’t writing it yet, although I was thinking about it all the time. This meant my desk was clear and there might just be time to get Hilda off my back.
There was something else I remembered. When Hawthorne and I visited Alderney for the literary festival that had led to the first murder on that island for a thousand years, he had mentioned something that had taken place in a close or a crescent of houses in Richmond, on the edge of London. It was one of the first cases he had solved as a private detective after he had been thrown out of the police force following an ‘accident’ that had led to the hospitalisation of a suspect he’d been questioning. Those inverted commas are well deserved. The man in question was a vile human being dealing in child pornography and Hawthorne had been right behind him on a steep flight of stairs when the man had somehow tripped and fallen.
I hadn’t seen Hawthorne for some time and it occurred to me that in a strange way I was missing him. I wouldn’t have described him as a friend, but after four outings together we were becoming something that vaguely resembled a team. It was also true that but for him, I would have been writing this from inside a prison cell. Even while I’d been talking to Hilda, I’d been thinking how good it would be to see him again.
I picked up the phone and called.