‘“What I aspired to be, And was not, comforts me: A brute I might have been, but would not sink i’ the scale.”’ I shrugged. ‘Robert Browning.’
‘But what about the money? The jet-set life in Monaco?’
‘Perhaps not all the money. I’ve been very well paid. In twenty years I’ve made almost two million pounds, before tax. True that’s not a fortune. In fact it’s chump change by Houston’s own elevated standard. But then again it’s more than I would ever have made as a copywriter. Plus, toward the end of my relationship with John I was also receiving a credit — an acknowledgement of my assistance, albeit in very small letters somewhere near the name of the cover designer and the name of the printer. And along the way I published a few more of my own novels. One or two of them were actually quite well reviewed. Working for John, I thought of it as a bit like an Arts Council grant; but for what he paid me I would have been obliged to go back to advertising and do a proper job writing commercials for toilet paper and lager. If you can call that a proper job. Oh, there are worse jobs than being an advertising copywriter, Chief Inspector; but I much prefer working from home. The commute is so much easier. And at least I had the illusion of being my own boss.’
Savigny returned to the table and for a moment he and Amalric spoke in French. It seemed that there were still no clues as to Houston’s whereabouts. The sergeant’s accent was warmer and friendlier than Amalric’s and I guessed he was from Marseille and that Amalric might originally hail from Paris.
I shrugged. ‘Like I said. If he doesn’t want to be found.’
‘You speak French?’ For a moment Amalric looked positively vulpine.
‘Yes.’
‘You didn’t say.’
‘You never asked. Besides, I think your English is better than my French.’
‘Thank you. I spent six months working with the FBI in Washington.’
‘How did that work out?’
‘Fascinating. I liked Washington. I like Americans. It’s the food I had a problem with. There’s so much of it. And so very little that’s any good. I must be one of the few people ever to live in the United States who ended up losing weight.’
I smiled. ‘They do like their chow.’
‘Your arrangement with Houston? How did that work?’
‘You might say that I was John’s maître d’. The head writer. I helped to manage the atelier. That’s what John called us — the people who worked in his ship’s boiler room — although I usually thought of it as a bit like the Pequod, because we were such a pagan bunch of misfits. At its peak we were producing four or five new books a year. And John was making between eighty and a hundred million dollars per annum.’
‘That much?’ Savigny whistled quietly. ‘Just from writing books?’
I nodded.
‘Incredible; perhaps I should write a novel about the Sûreté Publique,’ said Savigny. ‘In Monaco.’
‘I think an Italian author already did,’ I said. ‘Not that something like that should ever stop you, Sergeant. Lots of cops become writers: Joseph Wambaugh for one. And some of the most successful writers steal their best ideas from other writers. The book world calls that kind of thing an hommage. But mostly it’s downright theft. It happens every day and no one ever goes to prison for it.’
‘Je prends mon propre partout où je trouve,’ said Amalric.
‘I believe you’ve already met John’s agent, Hereward Jones. A year or so ago he negotiated a fifteen-book, world English rights deal with VVL — that’s John’s US publishers, Veni, Vidi, Legi — which the Wall Street Journal reported was worth $170 million. It’s a little hard to connect this with how things were in publishing twenty years ago. When John told his then UK publishers what he was planning to do — write and publish more than one new book a year — they were appalled. It’s said they actually thought of ending his contract there and then. At least they did until they saw the sales of his first book. Before that moment they had been living in a little Bloomsbury bubble with writers who were rather unworldly Angus Wilson types who smoked pipes, and wore tweedy jackets with leather elbows. They turned out a book every couple of years and generally did what they were told. Yes, there were a few writers like Jeffrey Archer and Dick Francis who were a bit more commercially minded than the rest of the field, but John Houston was really the first writer to come along and tell them that he was first and foremost a businessman whose business was writing and selling books.
‘He came up with the stories, and we, his collaborators, wrote the books. He preferred having English writers. For one thing he said we were cheaper than Americans. And for another he said he didn’t have to explain his jokes to us. For all of John’s love affair with America he thought the English easier to edit and more in awe of his power and wealth, he’d say, in a way that Americans never are. Over the years the ghost-writers came and went, with some working out more successfully than the others. One or two went on to be quite successful in their own right: C. Boxer Revell, for one and Thomas Chenevix for another — although Chenevix himself denies he was ever contracted to write one of Houston’s books and is inclined to sue anyone who says he did. They hate each other and famously came to blows in a London club called The Groucho with John punching Tom Chenevix down a flight of stairs; the police were called and both men were cautioned.’
‘What was the fight about? And when?’
‘Four years ago? Five? John rejected Chenevix’s manuscript. You see the way John usually works is that he sees material every four weeks. Like maybe ten or fifteen chapters. Chenevix had missed one of those meetings and had eight weeks’ worth of work that John rejected out of hand, which Chenevix — who has a very high opinion of his writing — took very personally. He called John all sorts of names and took a swing at him. More than one if the reports are correct. Pissed probably — Chenevix, I mean. John never drank very much. I’ve never seen him drunk, at any rate.’
‘This man, Chenevix. I should like to speak to him.’
‘I believe he lives in France. Somewhere in Provence. But I couldn’t tell you where. You could ask his publishers — HarperCollins. They’d probably know.’ I shrugged. ‘That was probably the last time John came to London to meet someone from the team. Soon after that he moved to Monaco and opened the Houston office in Paris. That’s what he called it. In fact, it wasn’t an office but a rented house in the western suburbs of Neuilly-sur-Seine — a pretty fabulous sort of place. Exquisitely furnished. Beautiful pictures.’ I frowned. ‘With one insightful exception.’
‘Yes?’
‘In the conference room where we had our meetings there was a large framed photograph of lots of chimpanzees in a library; all of the chimps were seated at desktop computers, as if they were writing something. John had seen the original — which was by a photographer called Louis Psihoyos — in National Geographic magazine, as the illustration for a feature about the information revolution. One or two of us thought it was insulting but John thought it was very funny. I think he meant that it should remind those of us who were part of the atelier of our true status in the Houston publishing empire. And it did. Certainly he used to think of us like his children and, in the case of some of his writers, that wasn’t so very wide of the mark. Some of these characters need careful handling. But John was good at that. It was only Chenevix who fell out with him badly. And perhaps Mike Munns, who also hit him.’
‘This was at the Houston office?’
‘Yes. Me, I’d have fired him. But Houston showed great restraint and kept him on. He said that writers are passionate and that sometimes you have to respect that.’
I paused and drank some more of the excellent Burgundy. The bottle was empty and Amalric was already beckoning another from the sommelier. I had to hand it to Amalric, he was very different from the kind of policemen we were used to in London. It’s not many cops who have a taste for Vosne-Romanée and Hermès ties, and who can quote Molière and Voltaire.