I neglected to add that on one occasion when I’d been staying in Beausoleil I had stood on my tiny balcony and urinated into Monaco which, at the time, gave me an absurd amount of schoolboy pleasure.
‘You never stayed with him?’ Savigny sounded a little surprised. ‘In your friend’s apartment?’
‘No. I was never asked. Oh, I went to the apartment in the Odéon Tower several times to deliver or to collect something. But ours was more of a business arrangement. It’s been a long time since we were something so innocent as friends.’
The waiter came back with my champagne and I toasted the two policemen politely. They were drinking gin and tonic. The sergeant put down his glass and placed a little Marantz dictation machine upright on the table in front of me.
‘Do you mind this?’ he asked. ‘It is difficult for us to eat and take notes at the same time.’
I shrugged. ‘No, I don’t mind. But look, what are you expecting me to say? I should tell you right now that I don’t think John Houston murdered his wife. I’ve known the man for twenty-five years and he doesn’t strike me as a killer. And believe me I know what I’m talking about. If he’s done a runner it’s probably because he’s scared, not because he’s guilty.’
‘Let’s order first,’ said Amalric, ‘and then you can tell us some more about why he’s innocent.’
I ordered a beetroot tartare and a seared loin of venison; Amalric ordered his own food and a hundred-and-twenty-quid bottle of Vosne-Romanée.
‘Your expense account must make entertaining reading,’ I said. ‘For a policeman.’
‘The Interior Minister of Monaco, Dominique de Polignac, takes all crime in the principality very seriously,’ said Amalric. ‘His specific orders to me before we came to London were that no expense is to be spared in catching Mrs Houston’s killer, and as you can see I am not a man who is inclined to disobey his superiors.’
‘Under the present circumstances, I’m very glad to hear it.’
‘Not that he reads much, you understand. The Minister is more interested in football. AS Monaco is his great passion. Did you know that Arsène Wenger used to manage the team?’
‘Yes, I did. And you, Chief Inspector? Do you have much time for reading?’
‘My wife died a few years ago and since then I have developed quite a habit for reading. Mostly I like to read history. Simon Sebag Montefiore. Max Hastings. But I confess I have never read a book by John Houston. Until his wife died I had never even heard of him. But Sergeant Savigny has read a lot of his books. Haven’t you, Sergeant?’
Savigny nodded. ‘I don’t know the English titles, only the French. But the Jack Boardman books. I have read all of them.’
‘Did you like them?’
‘Yes. I buy one at the airport every time I go on holiday. What I like is that you always know exactly what you’re going to get.’
The sergeant made it sound like a Big Mac. For some writers this would have been an insulting remark, but for Houston this was what his books were all about; a successful brand was based on a consistent product. Give them what they want and then teach them that they can have it again. And again. John had been a great believer in creating his own writing style, or more accurately his lack of one. He’d paid particular attention to the number of words in a sentence and the number of sentences in a paragraph. Verbiage, as he called the excessive use of words, was the great enemy of writers: Words only appear to be your friends; but you should think of them as the speed bumps on your page; they can slow the story down as much as they can keep it bowling along.
He had even created a writing lexicon of words that writers from the atelier were forbidden to use; words like ‘corollary’, ‘detumescent’, ‘uxorious’, ‘polyglot’, and ‘felicitous’.
As a rough rule of thumb, don’t use a word that isn’t in the Microsoft Word dictionary, unless it’s a proper noun, of course. Equally, don’t ever be afraid of using clichés. Not in my books. If you want your novel to be a page-turner then make clichés your friends. Clichés — the kind of writing that Martin Amis makes war on — are the verbal particle accelerators to finishing books. Original writing just slows a reader down and makes him feel inadequate. Like he’s thick. Which of course he is, but there’s no sense in rubbing that in. My readers actively approve of clichés. And forget about similes and metaphors; if you want to use similes and metaphors then go and write fucking poetry, not one of my books. People don’t like it. That’s why poetry doesn’t sell.
About the use of swear words in his books Houston was equally circumspect:
No more than one per chapter. And only in situations of extreme stress. A lot of people in Middle America don’t much care for profanity, so within reason, it’s best avoided.
Sergeant Savigny was still explaining why he admired the Houston canon. Harold Bloom it wasn’t, but listening to the Frenchman I had an idea that John would have been delighted with his deconstruction of John’s work:
‘The great thing about Jack Boardman is the way that you don’t get too much useless description; the woman wore a white dress and that’s it. Job done. I don’t need to know if the dress came from Chloé and if her shoes matched her handbag and her panties. If I want that kind of shit I’ll read Vogue. Also, I like the fact that you can just put the books down and then pick them up again without losing the plot.’
‘As a matter of fact I wrote all of the Jack Boardman books.’
‘You don’t say.’
Amalric frowned. ‘This is not something we understand. Houston puts his name to a book that you write, Monsieur Irvine, and he gets the big money while you are paid — forgive me — like a hired hand. How is this possible?’
‘He comes up with the story,’ I said. ‘The stories are pretty good. As Sergeant Savigny has explained, the stories are why people buy Houston’s books, not because of any fancy writing. We didn’t go in for much in the way of metaphors and similes. Just straight descriptions. You’re not supposed to notice the writing very much — just the story. He came up with the plots and I — or someone like me — wrote them. The actual writing was something that bored him greatly. Really it’s a bit like what Bismarck is supposed to have said about laws being like sausages. You should never watch either one being made. It’s best just to read the final product and not to pay any attention to the creative process. But that’s only my opinion. John himself loved to talk about the whole business of writing and exactly how he produced his books. He was really very open about it. Much more open than I’d ever have been. Especially when you’re talking to these bastards on the Guardian who are just looking to trip you up and tell the world what a fraud you are. The Guardian is a left-leaning newspaper in this country. They don’t like anyone with a bit of money. A bit like Libération in France, I think, but with less style. Anyway the lefties loved to hate John. What was it they called him? The Mies van der Rohe of the modern novel; because form follows function and ornament is a crime. The novelist of the machine age; that was another thing they called him. John loved that. He thought that was a compliment. I told him it wasn’t but he insisted it was, even though they meant it to be insulting. He had that page framed and hung on his office wall. And as a quote on some of his publicity. He was very good at creating publicity.’
‘In the last forty-eight hours he’s had more of that than perhaps even he could have bargained for,’ said Amalric. ‘With his face on the front of so many newspapers it won’t be long before we find him. So it would be better for Monsieur Houston if he were to turn himself in. I’m only saying this in case he does decide to get in touch with you.’