Crime Writers and Other Animals (7 page)

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
un
official 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.

Carlton Rutherford reckoned that, because all his research was already done, he had a head start. But only if he got down to the writing straight away. He knew that experienced journalists could – and frequently did – paste-and-scissor together celebrity biographies over a weekend.

He was greatly reassured as soon as he started the actual writing. So exhaustive had been his chronicling of Bartlett Mears' life that he could copy out most of his notebooks verbatim. The book was virtually written; all it needed was a little judicious editing, to take out the only-mildly-scurrilous incidents and bring the thoroughly scurrilous ones closer together.

He worked flat out for three weeks and the draft was done. It was the most searing indictment of a human being he had ever read.

One thing still niggled, though. Dashiel Loukes had been right. No biography of Bartlett Mears would really be complete without an infusion of Mariana Lestrange's distinctive vituperation. Her public set-tos with her former husband were well chronicled; but she was bound to have a store of character-destroying reminiscence of their life together. That was the dash of venom which the biography required.

He got her phone number from a literary editor who gave him occasional reviewing work. She answered the phone with the brusqueness of someone who jealously guards her privacy, but when Carlton Rutherford announced his mission, her manner changed.

Yes, she would be delighted to tell him anything he wanted to know. No fate was bad enough for that bastard Bartlett Mears.

Mariana Lestrange lived in Hampstead. Of course she did. Bartlett Mears still lived in Hampstead, come to that. So did the majority of the glamorous literati with whom he had had affairs before, during and after his second marriage. The supply of them in Hampstead was so constant, he'd rarely felt the need to look elsewhere.

She received the biographer in her imposing sitting room. One of its walls was shelved with British and overseas editions of her novels; another with international awards and citations.

‘So,' Mariana Lestrange purred in her famously sexy voice, ‘you want all the real dirt on Bartlett Mears . . .?'

She must have been nearly sixty, but was still very beautiful. Tall, slender, with a surprisingly ample bosom, she wore her artfully blonded hair as a frame to the small face whose nose would have been too large on someone less striking.

Carlton Rutherford felt a little uneasy in her presence. He always reacted that way to women of obvious sexual attraction. The state of his virginity remained precisely as it had been in 1959.

‘Yes,' he said nervously. ‘Anything you're prepared to tell me. Obviously, I know all the stuff that's been in the papers, but, er, anything more intimate would be . . . very welcome . . .'

‘Hm. Who's publishing your book?' she asked sharply.

‘Well, er . . . The thing is, that's not quite decided yet . . .'

‘Ah, I see. You mean it's going to be auctioned.'

Carlton Rutherford did not disabuse her of this error. For a writer of Mariana Lestrange's stature, auctions would be a regular occurrence. She knew nothing of the end of the market where publishers don't fight over books, but have to be cajoled into accepting them, and even then frequently don't.

‘Well, where shall we start . . .?' Mariana purred on. ‘Impotence the first night I agreed to make love to him . . .? Or Bartlett peeing over the bed in our honeymoon suite . . .? Or the time he hit me so hard he broke my jaw . . .?'

‘Oh, any of those. All of those. It all sounds wonderful!' Carlton Rutherford responded gleefully. ‘Fire away!'

So Mariana Lestrange fired away. She produced a savage catalogue of meanness, drunkenness, sexual malpractice, infidelity, theft and cringing deceit. She enumerated her former husband's disgusting personal habits – his practice of stubbing out cigarette butts in coffee cups, his self-pitying hypochondria, his pill-gulping, his nose-picking, his farting, his belching, his snoring, his halitosis and the revolting state in which he left his underwear.

The resentment born of five years' cohabitation seemed not to have mellowed one iota with the passage of time. Only the tiniest of prompts was required to bring it once again bubbling to the surface.

Carlton Rutherford's pen could hardly move quickly enough across the page to record this cataract of domestic villainies. With each new revelation he hugged himself, gleefully envisaging where it could be inserted into his narrative.

Dashiel Loukes had been right. This was the secret ingredient that the biography needed. There is nothing like total character assassination to send a book rocketing up the bestseller lists.

At times Mariana Lestrange's account sounded so vicious, the antics she described so evil, that Carlton Rutherford almost suspected her novelist's instinct was fictionalizing for his benefit, but if ever he asked a hesitant ‘Did he
really
do that?', she snapped back, ‘Of course! I know. I lived with the bastard!'