crowd was in audience mode, like promenaders at a particularly brutal piece of theater, and they had no intention of spoiling the entertainment. Even Martin had wondered at first if it was another show-a faux-impromptu piece intended either to shock or to reveal our immunity to being shocked because we lived in a global media community where we had become passive voyeurs of violence (and so on). That was the line of thought running through the detached, intellectual part of his brain. His primitive brain, on the other hand, was thinking,
He missed the man’s head, which didn’t surprise him, he’d never been able to aim or catch, he was the kind of person who ducked when a ball was thrown in his direction, but his laptop was in the bag and the hard weighty edge of it caught the Honda driver on the shoulder and sent him spinning.
The nearest Martin had been to a real crime scene previously had been on a Society of Authors’ trip around St. Leonard’s Police Station. Apart from Martin, the group consisted entirely of women. “You’re our token man,” one of them said to him, and he sensed a certain disappointment in the polite laughter of the others, as if the least he could have done as their token man was be a little less like a woman.
They had been offered coffee and biscuits-chocolate bourbons, pink-wafer sandwiches; they had all been impressed by the assortment-and a “senior policeman” had given a pleasant talk in a new conference room that felt as if it had been specially designed for groups such as theirs. Then they were shown round various parts of the building, the call center and the cavernous space of a room where people in plain clothes (NCIS) who were sitting at the computers glanced briefly at the “authors,” decided, correctly, that they were irrelevant, and returned to their screens.
They had all stood in a lineup, one of their members had her fingerprints taken, and then they were locked- briefly-in a cell, where they had shuffled and giggled to take the edge off the claustrophobia. The word “giggle,” it struck Martin, was an almost exclusively female verb. Women giggle, men simply laugh. Martin worried that he was a bit of a giggler himself. At the end of the tour, as if it had been staged for their benefit, they witnessed, with a little frisson of fear, a team being hastily assembled in riot gear to remove a “difficult” prisoner from a cell.
The tour hadn’t had much relevance to the kind of books that Martin wrote, in the person of his alter ego Alex Blake.They were old-fashioned, soft-boiled crime novels featuring a heroine named Nina Riley, a gung ho kind of girl who had inherited a detective agency from her uncle. The books were set in the forties, just after the war. It was an era in history that Martin felt particularly drawn to, the monochrome deprivation of it, the undertow of seedy disappointment in the wake of heroism. The Vienna of
Nina Riley had always been a tomboy, though she had no apparent lesbian tendencies and was constantly courted by a great variety of men, with whom she was remarkably chaste.
“Be that as it may,” she said, making a visible effort to look at him, “what I see is a book I can sell. A sort of jolly murder mystery. People
“Series?”
“Hi.”
Martin turned round and saw a man leaning against the doorjamb in an attitude of studied casualness. He was older than Martin but dressed younger.
“Hi,” the young editor said in return, giving the man her rapt attention. Their minimal exchange seemed to carry almost more meaning than it could bear. “Neil Winters, our MD,”she said with a proud smile. “This is Martin Canning, Neil. He’s written a
“Fantastic,” Neil Winters said, shaking Martin’s hand. His hand was damp and soft and made Martin think of something dead you might pick up on the beach. “The first of many, I hope,” Neil Winters said.
Within a couple weeks Neil Winters was transported into more elevated echelons in the European mother ship and Martin never saw him again, but nevertheless he saw that handshake as the identifiable moment when his life changed.
Martin had recently sold the television rights for the Nina Riley books. “Like getting into a warm bath. Perfect fodder for the Sunday evening slot,” the BBC producer said, making it sound like an insult, which, of course, it was.
In the two-dimensional fictional world that she inhabited, Nina Riley had so far solved three murders, a jewel theft, and a bank robbery; retrieved a stolen racehorse; prevented the kidnapping of the infant Prince Charles from Balmoral; and, on her sixth outing, foiled a plot (almost single-handedly) to steal the Scottish crown jewels. The seventh,
If people asked him-as they frequently did-why he had become a writer, Martin usually answered that, as he spent most of his time in his imagination, it had seemed like a good idea to get paid for it. He said this jovially, no giggling, and people smiled as if he’d said something amusing. What they didn’t understand was that it was the truth-he lived inside his head. Not in an intellectual or philosophical way, his interior life was remarkably banal. He didn’t know if it was the same for everyone, did other people spend their time daydreaming about a better version of the everyday? No one ever talked about the life of the imagination, except in terms of some kind of Keatsian high art. No one mentioned the pleasure of picturing yourself sitting in a deck chair on a lawn, beneath a cloudless midsummer sky, contemplating the spread of a proper, old-fashioned afternoon tea, prepared by a cozy woman with a mature bosom and spotless apron who said things like, “Come on, now, eat up, ducks,” because this was how cozy women with mature bosoms spoke in Martin’s imagination, an odd kind of sub-Dickensian discourse.
The world inside his head was so much better than the world outside his head. Scones, homemade black- currant jam, clotted cream. Overhead, swallows sliced through the blue, blue sky, swooping and diving like Battle of Britain pilots. The distant
Martin had been hauling his laptop around with him because the lunchtime comedy showcase he had been queuing for was a detour on today’s (very tardy) path to his “office.” He had recently rented the “office” in a