The Word Is Murder(58)

My wife is a television producer. She has such an extraordinary eye for detail that she could easily be a detective or a spy. I stood there, awkwardly. I hadn’t told her anything about Hawthorne.

‘I’ve had them for some time,’ I said. ‘I just don’t often wear them.’ We don’t lie to each other. Both statements were, broadly, true.

‘Where are you going?’ she asked.

‘Lunch with Hilda,’ I said.

Hilda Starke was my literary agent. I hadn’t told her about Hawthorne either. I left as quickly as I could.

The relationship between writers and their agents is a peculiar one and I’m not even sure I fully understand it myself. Starting with the basics, writers need agents. Most writers are hopeless when it comes to contracts, deals, invoicing – in fact anything to do with business or common sense. Agents handle all of this in return for ten per cent of what you earn, a figure which is actually very reasonable until you start selling a lot of books – but when that happens, you no longer care. They don’t do very much else. They won’t really get you work. If they manage to raise your advance, it will be by quite a lot less than the amount they’re taking for themselves.

An agent is not exactly your friend – or if they are, they’re a particularly flirtatious one with dozens of other clients whom they’re equally pleased to see. They may tentatively ask about your wife or children but actually it’s the progress of your new book that most interests them. It could be said that they have a one-track mind and that it’s perfectly in sync with Nielsen, the company that scans and tracks UK book sales. One week after I have a book published, Hilda will ring to tell me where it is in the charts even though she knows I hate it. ‘Book sales aren’t everything,’ I will tell her. And that, in a nutshell, is the difference between us.

I remember meeting her at City Airport, shortly after she had taken me on. We were on our way to Edinburgh for a talk I was giving and I was already surprised that she had agreed to come. Didn’t she have a home to go to, a family? I would never find out. She didn’t invite me to her home and I’ve never met her family. When I saw her, on the other side of security, she was yelling at someone on her mobile and she signalled me not to interrupt. It took me about ten seconds to work out that it was a publisher at the other end and another ten seconds to realise that it was my publisher. She had put on her shoes, belt, jacket and marched into the airport branch of W. H. Smith where she had discovered that my new book wasn’t stocked. She wanted to know why.

That was Hilda. Before I signed with her, I met her at book fairs in Dubai, Hong Kong, Cape Town, Edinburgh and Sydney. She knew everything about me: how well my latest book was doing, why my editor had just resigned, who was going to replace her. She really was the genie to my Aladdin, although as far as I could recall, I had never rubbed the magic lamp. It was inevitable that I would sign with her and in the end I did. I was far from her biggest author, by the way. Her talent was in making me believe that, actually, I was.

I always had to remind myself that, theoretically, she worked for me and not the other way round. Even so, I was always nervous when I was meeting her. She was a short, sharply dressed woman with tightly curled hair and very intense, searching eyes. Everything about her was tough: the way she jabbed her finger at you, the staccato phrases, the lack of emotion, the dress sense. She swore almost as much as Hawthorne. I liked her and feared her in equal measure.

I knew that I was going to have to tell her about the book I was writing. She would sell it. She would do the deal. I also knew that she would be annoyed that I had gone ahead without asking her first, which is why I held back for as long as I could, talking about anything else that mattered: marketing for The House of Silk, the possibility of a new Alex Rider (I had an idea for a book about Yassen Gregorovich, the assassin who had appeared in several of the adventures), ITV and the scheduling of Injustice, the next season of Foyle’s War if there was actually going to be one. Hilda was unusually twitchy, even by her standards, and as the waiter cleared the plates, I asked her what was wrong.

‘I wasn’t going to mention it,’ she said. ‘But you’ll probably read about it in the newspapers anyway. One of my clients has been arrested.’

‘Who?’

‘Raymond Clunes.’

‘The theatre producer?’

She nodded. ‘He raised money for a musical last year. Moroccan Nights. It didn’t do as well as expected.’ Hilda would never call anything a total flop, even if it had lost every penny. If a book was savaged by the critics, she would still find the single word that would allow her to claim it had had mixed reviews. ‘Now some of the backers are alleging that he misled them. He’s being investigated for fraud.’

So the story that Bruno Wang had told me after the funeral was true. I was surprised. I didn’t even know that Hilda represented theatrical producers, and wondered if she had lost money herself. I didn’t dare ask. But this was the opening I’d been looking for. I began by saying that I had recently met Clunes, that he’d been at Diana Cowper’s funeral. This got me talking about Hawthorne and finally I described the book I had agreed to write.

She wasn’t angry. Hilda never shouted at her clients. Incredulous would be a more accurate description. ‘I really don’t understand you,’ she said. ‘We’ve talked about moving you out of children’s books and establishing you as an adult author …’