When you’ve been in showbiz as long as I have, landmark anniversaries come around thick and fast. Put up some bunting, pour yourself a beaker of pop, then buckle up and read on. To begin with, we’re celebrating the 20^th anniversary of my first novel, Timoleon Vieta Come Home. I wrote this one between 1997 and 2002, and it came out in early 2003. I found it very hard, which is why it took so long. The first people who were supposed to publish it passionately disliked it – they said it would ‘not stand up to critical scrutiny’, and refused to put it out unless I made some really lame-arsed changes. I wasn’t having that, and after a long and ugly scrap I managed to wriggle out of their grip and shop it around the biz. 

A few years earlier I’d bought a small and superbly produced hardback edition of Fup by Jim Dodge, and thought my Anthropology stories would sit nicely in a similar volume. In 1998, when I felt the time had come to send them out, its publisher – Canongate Books – had been top of my list. They never got back to me though, and were consequently added to my blacklist, but after I read the brilliant John Fante books that they published I forgave them, so when Timoleon Vieta was free again, I approached them for a second time. I liked the idea of being published alongside John Fante, and the great Sylvia Smith’s Misadventures. I’d also read Laura Hird’s Born Free, and Be Wise, Be Otherwise by Kevin MacNeil, and wanted in. When they told me they liked it, and offered £4000, I jumped at it.

The London publishing scene was stuffy and square, but Canongate Books was different. They were based in Edinburgh for a start, they played music in the office, and the people who worked there were, mainly, a groovy bunch; I have fond memories of getting shitfaced with them in The City Café after work. While London had been dominated by posh people who worked in publishing because that’s what posh people do, this lot gave the impression of having blown in off the street because they loved books and wanted to get involved. It was a relief to get away from the Sloan Ranger side of things – while that wasn’t entirely absent here, this office was mainly the preserve of balls-out Scots, and as a hapless Englishman I had to squint my ears to keep up. These were my new colleagues, and I was happy again.

They did a great job on the production, taking one of the Vien Thuc paintings I’d included and slapping it on the front of a good-looking brown paperback with flaps. The very first ones had a kind of texture to them. Superb. And then it came out. Its awesome publicist helped get it some great coverage, it sold well, it won prizes, and it picked up some cracking reviews, including a belter from Michiko Kakutani in the New York Times – all of which made my former publisher look stupid. Mission Accomplished. It was translated all over the place, and I hit the road more or less non-stop for a year and a half.

It was a hard book to talk about, though. I’m always uncomfortable answering questions about my writing; this is partly because I’m a bit thick and can never think of a clever answer, but also because I’m old-fashioned enough to value plot, and don’t want to risk giving anything away. Perhaps more than any of my other books, this one has an ending that really defines it, and I struggled to talk about it because without touching on how it ends, I’m not really talking about the book at all. [I still get grief about the ending from lucky people who haven’t understood it.] And yet I ploughed on, mainly because I got to go on some amazing trips to places I had never been to before. I toured America with DBC Pierre, and England & Scotland with Jim Dodge; DBC & I were the warm-up act for the Flaming Lips in the Hague; another night I found myself singing Foreigner’s I Want To Know What Love Is while Brian Eno fed me helium to help me hit the high notes. They were good times, and inevitably they fizzled out.

[I was going to write a bit here about how the wheels came off shortly afterwards, how after they’d had an inexplicable hit the trustafarian who ran the show decided they should be more ‘professional’, and people I’d really enjoyed working with kept vanishing, while sleek execs were headhunted from the big houses in London, and the whole scene became less Scottish. You’d visit and it would be deathly quiet, with no music and everyone with their heads down in case they were given the chop for talking in class. They also spent a fortune changing their excellent logo to something that looks like it belongs on a 1980s revision guide. I decided to leave all this out, though – I’ll focus on the positives instead, and besides, breaking the publishing omertà is a lonely and thankless business, and right now I can’t be bothered with it. I was also going to make mention of how the royalties for the dog book stopped coming in around this time – all those shiny new execs, but somehow they couldn’t keep their accounts in order – but I’ve gone on about this in extraordinary detail before, and won’t bother you with that story again. I worked with loads of excellent people during those later years, but the spirit had gone. The squares had taken over.]

It’s out of print now, and will probably remain that way. It puts me too much in mind of the bad times, and is dead last on my list of novels I would like to revive. I can’t remember much about it, but I do remember how it ends. No matter how many people give me grief about it, I’ve always known that ending was the right way to go. Oddly, the 1980s boarding school casualties in charge of the company were exactly the kind of people I was railing against. I wonder what was going through their minds as they read it, and decided to publish it… I suppose they would have been cheering-on the baddie as he commits his atrocity. The reader’s not meant to be on his side, but they must have found a kindred spirit in him as he causes devastation in other people’s lives, then carries on without a backward glance – just as Jeff Bezos roots for Lex Luther when he reads his Superman comics. It takes all sorts, unfortunately.

It had a good life – it starred in Knocked Up, and Cate le Bon wrote a song about it. And I never did find out how to pronounce Timoleon Vieta.

The other anniversary is for my poor, neglected Marry Me, which is now ten years old. I love this book. Hardly anybody has read it, and that’s humanity’s loss. It was my sort-of-follow-up to Anthropology, and if you forced me to choose, I would say it’s the better book. We launched it at Clapham Grand, on a bill with Tim Key, Aidan Moffatt and a pre-inflatable-suit Sam Smith. When the American edition came out it had the most amazing review any book has ever had – an epic in the Washington Post. They loved it, and wouldn’t stop going on about how much they loved it. Sadly, though, it was launched as a Valentine’s Day title, and because nobody reads Valentine’s-themed books, let alone reviews of Valentine’s-themed books, it went unnoticed and had no impact on sales. Gutting.

Now it’s time for some commerce:

You should finally buy a copy of Marry Me. Just click here to do so in a way that makes me a couple of quid. When it arrives you’ll see that I’ve hand-corrected the typo in the bio.

You can buy the dog book as well, if you’re so inclined. The remaining copies live here.

And when I did the long piece about This is Life they sold out pretty quickly, but I found another box of them in the cellar so they are back in stock now.

And they’ve revived the hardback-for-a-fiver offer on Sour Grapes. Let’s face it, if you don’t take them up on this, there’s not a great deal of hope for you as a human being.

Commerce over.

Don’t worry, I think this is the only time you’ll be hearing from me this year. I’ll be back at some point though, with more of the usual. Hopefully I’ll have new stuff to report. I’m trying to get something together for 2025 – my Showbiz Silver Jubilee – but it’s hard to find the time. I just don’t know. 

Happy anniversary.

DR

Look at them. Don’t you wish you had one? Even if you do have one, see how good they look piled up. It’s been out for over a year now, and in spite of my enemies’ best efforts it’s ticked over surprisingly well. This comeback was all a bit of a leap into the unknown, and I wasn’t sure anybody would remember me so it’s a relief to know that there are still some people out there with incredibly good taste: people like you. Business-wise I tried out something new too – a profit-sharing deal offered by Eye & Lightning Books, where you don’t get an advance but if the book shifts you get a much better royalty rate than a normal publisher would offer. It was all very experimental, but so far it’s worked – I’ve had my first cheque for it. [It’s almost enough to make you wonder why authors put up with the crumbs-under-the-table model that’s offered by most of the rest of the biz…] Call me a breadhead, but I like getting paid; not least because it helps to fund my debilitating addiction to Japanese detective novels, but also because it’s a palpable signal that there are still people out there who dig my trip, and after a pulverising few years that was a much needed morale boost. Big thanks to everyone who’s bought a copy, and who’s helped us get word out that it exists – you’re a true patron of the arts. And if you haven’t bought it yet, read on…

We still have a pallet of hardbacks to shift, to make way for a paperback edition which will hopefully be out at some point next year. Here’s where you come in: instead of sending them off to the mincer like a normal publisher would, we’re banging them out at a fiver a pop. Even with postage added it’ll be the same price as your average paperback. And if you’re overseas, even with international postage it’ll make it a slightly less intolerable price than it was before. This offer runs through December, and it’s while-stocks-last, so grab ’em while you can. It’s a superb illustrated edition that would be a credit to anyone’s bookshelf. If you bought it at full price, please don’t be aggrieved – some of the money will have gone towards my new dehumidifier and/or the latest Keigo Higashino novel, so you’ve secured your place in heaven. All you have to do is click here, and before you know it this glorious object will be yours to keep. Why not get two – one to read, and one for best? If you spend over £15 at their shop they throw in free UK postage too, so go crazy.

Thanks for putting up with this unseemly self-promotion. As a reward for your patience I’m going to get through an entire update without complaining about Private Eye or C*******e Books. Bollocks to them still, of course, but I’m not going in deep this time. Enjoy the respite, and have as excellent a festive season as you realistically can.

DR

It’s true, my novel This is Life is turning ten years old. It’s a Parisian romp, and I love it to distraction. I recently found a pile of copies in the cellar (the edition above), so the stars have aligned and it’s time for a spectacular re-launch. If you’ve not read it, do yourself a favour and get a signed copy here.

Here’s the excessively long story of how I came to write it, and what happened next. It’s a tale of highs and lows. Babies are born, there are really tenuous cameos from pop stars and royalty, and – I would hate to disappoint – I spend half of it frothing at the mouth about the Usual Suspects. If that seems like something you’d be interested in, let’s get cracking. Make yourself comfortable, and don’t say I didn’t warn you.

It all began, as most things do, with a chicken pox vaccination in Stockport. Wife-features had never had that particular lurgi, and we were planning on having a second child, so she was advised to get herself jabbed. Our local medical practice couldn’t administer the injection, so we had to travel to Stockport, which is about twenty miles from where we live. We’d not been in the area long, and this was going to be our first trip there. She took to researching it, and started getting excited about the Hat Museum, and the Air Raid Shelter, and all the other things we could combine with the visit to the doctor. Then we found out that all those places were closed on Mondays, the day of the injection, and her plans turned to dust. We resolved instead to walk around the shops. They have a TK Maxx, so all was not lost.

To see her get so fired up about a trip to get an injection brought home quite sharply how we had slipped into a rut. This is quite normal with a pre-schooler on the scene, but I still felt an urgent need to up my husbanding game and give my poor bride something really worthwhile to look forward to – something even better than a half-day excursion to a specialist immunisation clinic in a nearby town. It meant dipping into life savings, but something needed to be done, and a few weeks later, with the toddler farmed out to grandparents, we were on the Eurostar heading for Gare du Nord, and a cheap hotel at the foot of Montmartre. We’d both been to Paris before, but only just. I was there for a couple of days while Interrailing at the age of seventeen. The city was, of course, wasted on me back then. Wife-features had also visited as a teen, on a visit from her home in Manila to family in Germany, when she’d been taken on a whistle-stop tour of Europe in her uncle’s car. For her, Paris had been a quick meal at a Chinese restaurant, a hurried gawp at a distant Eiffel Tower, and a hasty retreat. It felt like the first time for both of us and we were, it would be pretentious to deny it, very much tourists. 

A few years earlier I’d published a novel set in Paris, The Little White Car, which I’d written – for no reason other than it amused me at the time – under the transparent pseudonym of Danuta de Rhodes; a youthful, glamorous and female alternative to myself. I’d hoped to visit the city while writing that book, to do some extensive research in the bars and cafés, but the wages from my stockroom job at a bookshop never quite reached the point where I could cover it. So instead I’d bought the Time Out guide, and worked with that. [Incidentally, This is Life takes place in the same universe as The Little White Car; they share a character. A character from Little Hands Clapping makes a cameo too.]

So there we were. Paris. This was 2010, before smartphones had been invented (well, in our house, anyway) and we’d forgotten the camera, so we bought a disposable one – the viewfinder of which, we subsequently discovered, was aligned in such a way as to make sure we were only taking pictures of each other from the knees down. The first thing we did was get lost on the way to the hotel. Then, once we’d found it and dumped our bags, we got lost again (which was fine – you don’t really know a city until you’ve repeatedly got lost in it). At one point we found ourselves on Rue Eugène Carrière, named after the painter. This was a cause of jubilation, because a few years earlier we’d found ourselves transfixed by a tiny picture of his, Enfant avec une casserole, at Aberdeen Art Gallery, and an oversized canvas of it hung on our wall at home (it still does). Suddenly, by mistake, we were lost on a road named after him.

We looked for streets that seemed to go uphill, and soon we were winding our way to Montmartre. Before long, a minor drama began to unfold on the road ahead. In this neighbourhood it’s possible (at least it was back then) to rent a groovy old Citroën 2CV, complete with driver, to cruise the narrow lanes. One of these little beauties was up ahead, and it was having a bad day, struggling to make it up the cobbles. When we reached it, we asked the driver, a young woman who seemed to be having a great time regardless of the grinding noises coming from under the bonnet, if we could help. She jovially declined, saying that if it came to it her passengers could get out and push. She gave the impression that this was quite a regular event for a 2CV driver in Montmartre. I caught a glimpse of these passengers, grim-faced in the back seat, and hoped that it would come to it. It would have been quite a show. Sadly, she skilfully got the car moving just enough to regain its momentum, and off they went, leaving just a black cloud and a burning smell. An episode like this ended up in the book, the role of the driver taken by the character Sylvie. [The only time I’ve ever used the ‘this-character-looks-like-this-famous-person’ shortcut in my writing was when I described Sylvie as resembling a Godard-era Chantal Goya. Usually I would consider this to be lazy writing, and I would be right, but I couldn’t find a way to improve on it, so just this once I let it sneak through. I named her after the superb story ‘Sylvie’ by Gerard de Nerval, which I recently re-read after many years, and discovered it also contained a character called Aurélie – the name of Sylvie’s co-conspirator in my book. It’s a small world.]

We’d only just arrived in the city, and a story was forming. I already had the starting point. I’d cut a thread out of The Little White Car where a stone was thrown into a crowd as the instigation of an art project; I’d liked the idea, but it was too much of a tangent for a breakneck novel so I booted it into the long grass. Here was its moment.

The next day we walked along the Seine, where we saw a cormorant, and I held my breath for as long as it stayed underwater. We strolled through various gardens, often beneath horse chestnut trees, where we marvelled at the carpets of conkers lying, ignored, below. I briefly considered running a conker import/export sideline. We ate falafel in Le Marais, and went on an evening trip to the Musée de l’Érotisme. We ate breakfast at Amélie’s café, and visited Shakespeare & Co., where – as if they’d known I was coming – there was a face-out copy of Little Hands Clapping. As I wandered around Montmartre Cemetery I jotted down names for future use, almost as if I was a proper writer. Pretty much everywhere we went over the course of those three days ended up worming its way into the book. By the time we were on the train home the foundations were in place; the rest I would have to make up as I went along.

***

I was in a hurry. This was in the dying days of writing being my main job. I’d always taken on odds and sods of casual labour on the side to keep afloat, but with a growing family and a plummeting bank balance it was looking certain that I would have to get a reliable wage coming in before too long, particularly if we were ever to claw our way out of renting. Don’t ask me why, but banks tend to be hesitant to provide mortgages to people who don’t have regular employment. Part of the solution to all this was to write a potboiler. I love reading short, quick, action-driven balls-out-commercial novels, so I had no qualms about this. I gave myself three months to finish a disposable 50,000-word romp that I could flog for enough money to add to our dwindling savings and wave at the bank as a deposit, and maybe convince them to make up the balance on a small house. Off I went. I decided to reanimate my old commercial fiction alter-ego, Danuta de Rhodes. Writing behind a pseudonym, however flimsy and facetious, opened a room in my brain that I didn’t otherwise have access to, and together we got off to a flying start. 

It wasn’t long before I realised that I’d failed to achieve my dream of dispassionately rattling off some throwaway pulp that I could forget about the moment I’d flogged it. The main characters instantly became my pals, and I knew I was going to take as much care over this as I had my other books, and be just as attached to, and maniacally defensive of, the finished product. But still, I kept the speed up. For the first time, I started a book on page one and let it unfold from there. Everything before this point I’d written piecemeal, jumping ahead to set-pieces, and pasting everything together as time went by. This time I wouldn’t jump ahead; if I had an idea for a scene, I would have to write myself to that point before tackling it. And it worked. It spurred me on, I wasn’t getting tangled up, and I was loving it, writing loads every day. I even snuck away from the sprouts on Christmas day and wrote a couple of thousand words. The story grew, and morphed as it went along. 

I won’t say much about what happens (as Morag MacLochness would say, yous’ll huv to buy the book to find oot), but I kept going, and stuck to my timeframe. Three months after starting, the whole thing was done. Its predecessor, Little Hands Clapping, had taken three years. I’d failed quite spectacularly in the length department – it was over twice as long as I’d planned: at 108,000 words it remains the longest book I’ve written. So much for my pocket potboiler. I’d never written like that before, and I couldn’t have been happier with how it had all come together. I had a really good feeling about this one.

***

There’s a terrible point in a book’s life when you have to take it out of your head and into the cruel world. As usual I didn’t have an agent – agents don’t like me – so it went straight to my publisher of the time, a Scotland-based operation whose name escapes me. They came back all positivity, and said they wanted to publish it, but on one condition: that I put it out under my own name. The squares had taken over. I hated this idea. I knew that if I did this I would be permanently shutting the door on the Danuta room in my brain, the very thing that had fuelled this book, and made it such a joy to write (and, I was hoping, to read). They gave me a tight deadline to decide: ‘This offer is off the table at noon tomorrow’ (you don’t have to read that in a Scottish accent – a cabal of minor English aristocrats seized power a long time ago), a move that seemed heavy handed, unnecessary and just plain ‘orrible. Alarm bells rang, but when it came down to it I desperately needed the money, and I caved in. I can’t win every battle, and maybe I’m not always right about everything. Perhaps it really was time to put Danuta to sleep. Looking back, having accepted the decision to kill her off I should then have taken the book on to the open market. Because of its size (mainstream publishers, bless their hearts, love 108,000 word novels) and potentially broad appeal (well I think so, anyway) I’m pretty sure it would have generated interest. I’d had a gathering Bad Feeling about that operation for a while – so much about it just didn’t seem quite right – but I’d suppressed it. If I’d had more trust in my instincts I’d have got out sooner from what I subsequently realised was a Very Bad Situation. But it was what it was, and it all happened quickly. It felt as if I was selling a limb, but I signed the contract, cashed the modest but helpful cheque and hoped for the best.

Surprisingly, I soon got over my uneasiness. Thanks to my scraps with their god-awful bosses, I’m often guilty of forgetting that most people who labour in the book mines are excellent, and I worked with some great humans at that place. One of them helped me with my dismal French (I’d included phrases here and there, all of them wrong), the copy editor and proof reader (the engine room of the industry) were a pleasure to work with, and the cover… well, the cover was fantastic. I’m inclined to stand aloof from jacket designers. I don’t want to get under their feet; the last thing they need is an author hovering around offering ‘helpful ideas’. I can claim no credit for it at all. If you’ve seen the first edition, you’ll know what a beauty it is. It had fold-out flaps with a Parisian street scene that included little nods to things that happen in the story. 

Wowza. And just look at the inside: 

A total stunner from Dermot Flynn & Rafaela Romaya, in conjunction with the publisher’s in-house art department. I could hardly believe I had such a beautiful book out. It was printed on high quality paper, too. Bookshops loved it, it was picking up great coverage, and was selling well. It was the kind of book that’s in such a magical edition that people are going to want it even if they have no idea who I am or what it’s about. As a thing alone, it was an amazing object. I was so proud of it. Here it is in the window of Foyles at St. Pancras Station, home of the Eurostar, where it was selling like a dream. Look how happy I am. [I still have that shirt. I wear it when I’m decorating.]

Publisher, author and bookshop in perfect harmony.

Needless to say, the wheels soon came off. 

I’d noticed that the photo credit on the cover was wrong, and contacted the publisher to ask them to correct this for future printings. Routine stuff for a first edition. I heard back that they had already reprinted the book, but that there had been ‘no room’ for the photo this time. This didn’t sound right. I asked them to send me a copy. A few days later an ominously skinny jiffy bag arrived. Inside was a monstrosity. Get your sick bag ready:

Ugh.

Prior to publication, a proof edition of the book had been circulated. If you’ve ever worked in the trade you’ll be familiar with these – early copies, not meant for sale, that are printed on poor quality paper. There’s a move towards calling them ‘galleys’, but I’m too old to change. Either way, the idea is to get friendly booksellers, journos, etc., on side prior to publication by sending them advance copies, at the same time producing something that looks a bit blah, and won’t ever be confused with the finished version. What arrived in the post – the second printing of This is Life – was on exactly the same low-grade paper as the proof had been. I put them side by side, and apart from the bar code there was nothing to distinguish them. They were essentially selling a proof as though it were the finished product, which is 100% not cool. The spectacular flaps were gone, the inside covers were bare white, the ink was faint. Because of the cheap, thin paper, the book was noticeably less substantial than it had been. There’s almost a centimetre’s difference between the two versions.

I hit the roof, and ten years later I’ve still not come down.

They explained. The first run had sold out, and reorders were coming in, but the powers that be had crunched the numbers and decided that on a shorter print run they wouldn’t turn much of a profit if they maintained high production standards. So they had decided instead to scuttle everybody’s hard work, and churn out a wretchedly poor-quality run to fulfil demand. This was a failure on so many levels. The book had been off to a flying start, not least because of the sheer excellence of the edition. This is what was being ordered: a superb quality item, not a nasty knockoff.

For their trade customers, it was a seedy bait-and-switch – the ISBN was unchanged, so bookshops re-ordering what they thought was the same edition would in reality be ordering a wildly inferior physical product. I wonder whether this is even legal – if it is, it shouldn’t be. Having worked in a bookshop for many years, it made my blood run cold (and boil at the same time). Any reader ordering it wouldn’t know until it arrived that the publisher’s quality standards had disappeared around the u-bend, and anyone browsing in a bookshop would wonder why there was such an underwhelming-looking book on the shelves at such a disproportionately high price, and buy something else instead. Even now when people buy it on the collectors’ market it’s a case of Russian Roulette as to whether or not they’ll get the real edition or the bootleg-quality abomination. I’ve been in the biz for 28 years, and I’ve never known a book to suffer such a dramatic drop in its production values on the same ISBN. I can’t think of anything even coming close. 

All momentum was lost. What a rotten way to run a business. As well as it being two-fingers to their trade customers, and end customers (a.k.a. my readers, for crying out loud) it was a kick in the teeth for everyone – their own colleagues – who had worked so hard to get it to where it was: in the shops, looking great, and selling.

Accountants are sovereign in publishing, and I understand that balance sheets are important, but when those accountants have no understanding of what books are, what they mean to authors and readers, or even what their trade customers are expecting when they place an order, things fall apart. But you can’t blame the accountants for everything. The people at the top of the book side of the company must have had at least some knowledge of the basics of ethical commerce, and known of the importance to themselves and their authors, not to mention their colleagues, of not publishing worse-than-nothingy editions for the sake of saving a couple of hundred quid. Bollocks, to this day, to the people who run that company. 

When I challenged them about this move, they loftily asked me if I would rather it hadn’t been reprinted at all, as if I would suddenly see that they had in fact made a justifiable, perhaps even inspired, business decision, and would come around to their way of thinking. They must have thought that when it came down to it I was just as wilfully myopic and professionally slovenly as they were, and they seemed surprised and affronted when I told them that YES, I would so much rather they hadn’t reprinted at all than tricked my readers into buying a shitty edition. It would have been much more sensible to have the amazing edition sell out, and wait for the mass market paperback to come around. It would still be an e-book if anybody was desperate to read it in the interim. To their ongoing discredit they doubled down on their decision. Apparently I just didn’t understand the business. Throughout they acted exasperated, as if I was making a lot of unnecessary fuss over a minor detail.

If I’d had an agent, their role would have been to step in and help sort this out (whether they would have done is another matter), but as I was managing myself I had to deal with the publishing house’s senior management on my own. David & Goliath time again. Yawn. In this situation you have a simple choice: you either curl into a ball and let the Sloane Rangers get away with whatever it is they’ve been up to, or you make an absolute menace of yourself. Some of you with long memories may remember that at this point I used the only weapon in my armoury and went apeshit on the Internet. Unable to publicly defend the indefensible, the publisher at last agreed to stop the distribution of this edition. I don’t know how many copies were printed, how many left the warehouse, or how many were held back. I should have asked for figures, and supporting evidence, but the whole thing was so brain-sautéingly weird and disorientating I just wanted it to be over. [These people were supposed to be my allies! My team! It’s so odd!] I know, though, that far too many of the mutant editions got into the outside world. Maybe even hundreds. If you have one, I’m sorry. It was done behind my back, and they’d hoped I wouldn’t find out. Rest assured I was furious then, and ­– as you’ll have gathered – I’m still furious ten years on. If you got a decent copy though, well done. Good, isn’t it? I still frequently wake up in the middle of the night bubbling with rage about this wretched episode. It was the beginning of the end of my time with that particular publisher. 

Misgivings that had been pecking away for a long time reached critical mass, and all benefit of the doubt drained away. From that point on it was all about the exit strategy. Seriously, publishers – you can either have a good relationship with your authors, or you can deliberately bollocks up their editions. It’s one or the other. J.D. Salinger knew the score (from Joanna Rakoff’s ‘My Salinger Year’):

A perfectly decent small format paperback was quietly released a year later, and after just four years I had to pull it out of circulation, along with my other titles from that house, after I found a huge pile of my earnings had gone AWOL. The same finance department that had insisted on that cheapo edition hadn’t been doing its job properly in other ways too. Thanks to them, and the creepy management culture that surrounds them, it’s celebrating its tenth birthday out of print. Rats’ cocks. It lives on though, in its quiet way. Whenever my library loans statement comes in, This is Life is always the runaway winner, head and shoulders above the others. Also, I recently found a load of smaller format paperbacks in the cellar (decent editions, you’ll be pleased to hear – the one at the top of this long, long piece), and you can buy a copy – or even several copies – via the Big Green Bookshop while stocks last. [If you buy them elsewhere I won’t get paid a penny, and they’ll be second hand and most likely covered in a stranger’s jammy smears. Incidentally, did you know that 80% of strangers use toenail clippings as bookmarks?].

I’ll finish by tying up some loose ends.

The injection happened, and we had a good time at the shops in Stockport. We’ve been back many times since, and have grown fond of the place. We’ve finally made it to the Hat Museum, which is brilliant (see below for the long-awaited celebrity cameos), and the Air Raid Shelter. #visitstockport.

Rather than doing the right thing and leaving the industry in shame, the same core people remain at the top of that publishing house, where they regularly award each other promotions and pay rises. Don’t let the cheesecloth dungarees fool you – they are a bunch of Tories. For the good of my health I’ve not been in direct contact with them for two years. Our last exchange came when I wanted, not unreasonably I feel, to know the story behind the latest batch of missing money. They wouldn’t cooperate, but eventually they explained that they weren’t going to answer my questions because I ‘continue to ask’ them. Wonderful logic there. I kept at them though, and eventually discovered that many years previously The Little White Car had been a modest hit in a small European country, and the royalties hadn’t reached me. They were found in an audit by that publisher’s new owners, who were honest enough to forward them. Why I had to go in like Giant Haystacks just to get some simple information about something that was very much my business is anyone’s guess (mine being that they want my every interaction with them to be a crushingly demoralising ordeal so that I’ll stop requesting the basic information I’m entitled to – if so, to give them their due, it is quite an effective strategy. The longer they drag things out, the harder it is for the situation to be resolved). Seriously, publishers – when money goes missing it’s an extremely big deal that needs to be properly sorted out. It’s your mess, and it’s your responsibility as human beings to make sure the author gets through a traumatic episode of your making in one piece. When even more money is found to have gone missing, the same applies – perhaps even more so. Don’t just send them some Snoopy books, languidly announce that you’ve had a glance at the accounts and found everything to be fine, and come over all indignant when they tell you they don’t feel that either of those are an adequate substitute for straight answers and external scrutiny. That would make you the same as them, and I would like to think you’re better than that.

A few months before the book came out I let go of the excellent little office I’d been renting and got a steady job, outside the book world, which I still hold down. A while later we were able to hypnotise the bank into lending us enough to buy a cottage on a hillside, where we live to this day. A month after moving in we had our second baby, and he’ll be turning ten this year too. Tempus fugit. And after several years of being too demoralised to pick up a pen I managed to get a new book, Sour Grapes, written and released at the end of last year. Don’t forget to buy a copy while it’s still an excellent hardback.

Danuta de Rhodes hasn’t forgiven me for betraying her. I don’t blame her. I can’t see her ever coming back. Balls.

The vaccine didn’t take – a couple of years later everybody in the house except me came down with chicken pox. But something pretty amazing, for me anyway, came out of being sent to Stockport: This is Life. Of all my books, it’s the one I’ll turn to in old age, when I remember I used to be a writer, and wonder whether I was any good or if I was just wasting my time.

Happy birthday to Herbert & pals.

À bientôt.

Lately I’ve been receiving complaints about being too positive. I can see where these have come from – I’ve got a new book out, in a lovely edition, and by and large people seem to be digging it, so yes, perhaps I have been a little on the happy-clappy side. So, to reassure you that I’ve not entirely gone over to the light, here are my thoughts on a recent shabby episode.

Warning: the following contains invective. Read no further if that sort of thing troubles you.

Here’s how it all went down. The moment Sour Grapes came out, Private Eye magazine ran a huge and vicious review, torpedoing our small-press, £0-advance novel as though it were a hyped six-figure behemoth that needed taking out. Tossers. Shitty reviews are a depressing part of the rough and tumble of publication season – ask any author: they are inevitable. Mostly, though, once the red mist has lifted it’s possible to feel sorry for the rotten wazzock reviewer for having such poor taste, before getting on with your day (with, if you are in any way human, a lifelong grudge safely stashed away on the dark side of your heart). I can’t even complain too much, as I’m here to freak out the squares, and in a way it would be a disappointment if at least some of them didn’t oblige by being freaked out from time to time. The Royal Literary Critics’ Guild is bursting at the seams with their kind, and the villain of this piece is at the heart of that world. Some reviews still really get my goat, though, particularly those that are full of telltale signs that their writer has opened the book determined not to like it, and has most likely accepted, or even pursued, the commission because they see an opportunity to grind their axe. The most obvious giveaways are misreadings, which betray either a lack of attention to their work, or a determination to stick to their initial plan of destruction without being hamstrung by facts (remember those?). The Private Eye reviewer was guilty of this kind of bollocks, but what really pushed me over the edge was them committing the sin of sins: giving all the plot twists away. What kind of spiteful knobhead would do that? I made it my mission to find out.

[Note to overseas readers: Private Eye is a long-running fortnightly magazine whose raison d’être is to uncover political hypocrisy, corruption, and the slippery ways of newspapers, big business, etc.. They also have a lot of funnies scattered throughout; it’s been at the centre of the British satirical scene since the 60s. The cartoons are great. It’s a broadly righteous entity, albeit one with a creepy whiff of boarding school snobbery about it. I don’t subscribe, but I’ve been a regular reader over the years. Circulation c.210,000]

As with all the Private Eye book reviews, it was published anonymously – they don’t reveal the identities of their critics in case the offended authors (all of us, as their reviews are invariably snarky) leave unpleasant items on their doorsteps. So I had to play detective…

Sadly (because it’s likely to scupper my plans for a 24-part Netflix adaptation of this post), it turned out that solving The Extraordinary Case of the Anonymous Cretin was quite elementary. One morning, after I’d been gnashing my teeth for a few weeks as I scoured for leads, a workmate brought in a photocopy of a review of Sour Grapes that they’d seen in The Spectator magazine. As I read it, I had a creeping sense of déjà vu. Dolly zoom.

[Note to overseas readers: The Spectator is a right wing hellrag, mainly written by bug-eyed, fact-bending psychopaths. However, like a lot of nauseating, bile-spewing publications (see also the Daily Mail) they maintain a reasonably civilised book section. I suspect that this is because the management don’t read books, and leave the swots to get on with it relatively undisturbed. Circulation c.100,000]

The Spectator review was written by a little-known novelist called DJ Taylor, and was noticeably similar to the one in Private Eye. It was less waspish overall, but there was so much overlap, with so many of the snarky observations being identical that I was left in no doubt as to the identity of my shadowy foe. Busted! 

This discovery added a glorious layer to Taylor’s ignominy. It wasn’t so much a case of ‘Last night a DJ saved my life’ as ‘Last night a DJ clumsily rewrote a piece he’d already placed with one magazine, and flogged it to a rival publication, hoping nobody would notice’ – as if writing nasty reviews wasn’t already a low enough occupation. I don’t know how Private Eye feel about this flagrant double-dipping, but I’ve heard rumours that the books desk at The Spectator are so impressed by DJ Taylor’s initiative and enterprise in charging them top whack for microwaved leftovers that they’ve presented him with a ‘Cherished Contributor’ statuette for the mantelpiece of his Norwich bungalow. Congratulations, DJ!!!!

With the mystery solved, I could now crack on with comparing and contrasting these reviews (though there’s not a great deal of contrasting to be done), going through them line by line and bringing them crashing down. But I won’t trouble you with that. At some point you’re going to have to get on with the ironing or something, and I don’t want to keep you here too long. Trust me though, DJ Taylor’s work is balls-out bad writing, and it makes for bad reading. I’ll save my deeper thoughts for the witness box. I will, though, single out one particularly wretched angle that he took in both reviews. Get a load of this, from the Spectator review:

Amazing – but not in a good way. In Sour Grapes I make lots of gags about the London book scene being ruled by toffs, but DJ Taylor derides me for this, seeming to be under the impression that one day, somewhere around 2007, somebody high up blew a whistle and the British publishing world magically turned into an egalitarian paradise. This is the kind of laughably demented hogwash you’d expect from The Spectator, but it’s a bit tragic to see the same insidious sentiment in Private Eye. In both reviews it’s central to Taylor’s dismissal of the book, brought in as a concluding flourish, but I wonder why the Eye waved through such transparent piffle. I can’t help wondering whether it would have anything to do with DJ Taylor being an old Oxford University mucker of the Eye’s editor, Ian Hislop? Could it be that Hislop has granted his old frat buddy carte blanche? 

[Incidentally, a couple of weeks ago The Guardian ran a piece by Natalie Jerome in which she decried the inequalities in the publishing biz. She strikes me as a righteous firebrand, and I would sooner listen to her than a sexagenarian white male luvvie from private school. She’s a rare example of a literary agent who has the guts to call out publishers when the need arises (I once had an agent whose mantra was ‘Don’t rock the boat’ – in other words: keep your head down; be meek. I struggled to comply, and we soon parted ways). Natalie Jerome works for Curtis Brown, the agency that also represents a certain DJ Taylor. Maybe she’ll collar him at their next summer party and set him straight. I do hope so. I’ve been in the book trade, in one way or another, since 1994, and in all that time publishers have been bleating on about the importance of increasing social diversity, without doing nearly enough about it. There remains a long, long way to go. (As a side note, Curtis Brown also represent Adolf Hitler, but we don’t have time to go into that now.)]

Cronies sorting one other out with low quality work that they are able to undertake without scrutiny is exactly what Private Eye is supposed to be dead set against. Yet the desperate hacks who write their reviews (and I would put hard cash on them being predominantly ageing males) seem to have a licence to publish any old bollocks. It’s a shame, really, because once you know for a stone-cold fact that these people make things up to suit themselves (a few people got in touch with their own similar experiences) it makes you wonder what else Private Eye is letting through unchecked. It weakens the good work they are doing on some of their other pages. There are plenty of kick-arse journalists working for them on important stories, and it’s a shame that their book pages, being a rest home for pathetic old shitsacks, undermines this. It’s certainly settled the eternal ‘Should-I-subscribe?’ question.

Tempted as I am to keep this going until the end of time, I’ll start to wrap things up with a bit of barrack room legal philosophy. In both his reviews, DJ Taylor makes much of there being dramatic talk about whether or not I’ll be sued for writing Sour Grapes. This hasn’t been the case at all – whenever it has been mentioned it’s been in a light-hearted way, in keeping with the spirit of the book (also, at the time of filing the Private Eye piece, only one other review had been published, and Taylor chose to inflate their playful mention into a Big Deal). However, legal repercussions could still be on the cards. While the Private Eye review was still anonymous, I went jovially apeshit on the Internet and called its unknown author a ‘dingy dickhead’, a ‘turd’, a ‘cretin’, a ‘pitiable square’, a ‘dismal book trade patsy’ and, I expect, plenty of other things ­– all hurled in jocular fury at a nameless figure hiding in the shadows. At one point I went so far as to lump all their anonymous reviewers together and dismiss them as ‘absolute pricks’. Now that DJ Taylor has ham-fistedly blown his own cover, might he sue me for saying those things, even though I didn’t know who I was saying them about at the time? Or will I be allowed to continue calling him anything I called him before his identity became known to me? And if not, why not? And if I’m allowed to call him, say, a ‘dingy turd’ with impunity, why would other people not be allowed to do so as well? “Welcome to the Today Programme here on BBC Radio 4. This morning we’ll be talking about the just-announced Booker Prize shortlist with the dingy turd DJ Taylor.” It strikes me as a risk you take when you decide to become an anonymous critic, and it’s all come back to bite him on the arse. Judging by the content of these two reviews, Taylor seems to be morbidly preoccupied with the topic of low-level litigation, so hopefully he’ll send in the lawyers and we can leave it up to Judge Nutmeg to decide. Lord knows we could use the publicity. Either way, I expect this tricky point to be debated in ethics seminars around the world for decades to come.

[Note to DJ Taylor’s legal team: the above instance of the term ‘pathetic old shitsacks’ is the first time I’ve used it in this saga, and I am happy to confirm that I am including your client in the group to which it refers. I feel this is pitched at a comparable level of jocund vituperation to the other examples given. However, since it is new to the squabble, and is the only such slur introduced after I became aware of his identity, I would suggest you concentrate on this phrase when we get to court. Don’t forget: it’ll all come down to ‘pathetic old shitsacks’.]

Not that I’m suggesting you lay into him, of course. I wouldn’t want you to get into trouble, and besides it must already be bad enough to be DJ Taylor – he’s in his sixties, nearing the end of his life, and he must have moments when reality intrudes and he realises how low he has sunk: imagine being reduced to ruining other writers’ novels by giving away their plot twists, and ending your days re-heating and re-selling reviews to meet the cost of your Werther’s Originals. He’s a sad man and a small man, so please don’t hate him. Pity him and, if you are so inclined, pray for him.

[One last thing: sometimes even friendly reviews give too much plot away. Stop doing this, book reviewers. Nobody wants it. I genuinely believe that this is one of the main reasons why your line of work is in a death spiral.]

And if you’ve not got your copy of Sour Grapes yet, let Rebus persuade you:

Happy reading.