Talking about books and bookmen again. A letter in the Mail on Sunday starts it off and I quote – “Celebrity novelists are so boring. Why don’t celebrity obsessed publishers turn to good, real writers? I have never yet been able to finish a novel by a celebrity writer. Publishers would benefit by not having to pay out so much money and maybe people would start enjoying good books again.” The reason I would think why this good lady finds celebrity novels (note: not biographies which are more than likely ghosted anyway and there are always exceptions to the rule, Dirk Bogarde for example) is because although it may be said that everyone has at least one book inside them, writers might be celebrities but celebrities for the most part simply aren’t writers, having neither the talent nor the craft honed by years of hard graft.
Am currently reading and thoroughly enjoying a book written by a real writer. This is the first of his books I have come across but I see he has a number, both fiction and non-fiction, to his credit. The book is titled “The Ghost” and it is by Robert Harris and again I would like to quote if I may – “Of all human activities, writing is the one for which it is easiest to find excuses not to begin – the desk’s too big, the desk’s too small, there’s too much noise, there’s too much quiet, it’s too hot, too cold, too early, too late. I had learned over the years to ignore them all, and simply to start …. A book unwritten is a delightful universe of infinite possibilities. (For me those ten little words are in themselves a beautiful piece of writing. How could anyone better it? But let’s continue) …. In the absence of genius there is always craftsmanship. One can at least try to write something which will arrest the reader’s attention – which will encourage them, after reading the first paragraph, to take a look at the second, and then the third.”
We have all just finished reading Paul O’Grady’s autobiography “At my mother’s knee – and other low joints” (good old panto gag) and, although Mr O’Grady is a celebrity and possibly doesn’t consider himself a writer we not only read the first, second and third paragraphs but could hardly put the book down until the end and then, left dangling from that very high cliff top, will have to wait patiently for more. Let’s hope it won’t be too long a wait
But now we come to the third book I want to talk about. This is a thriller, was written by someone with another fourteen books to his credit, published by a major publisher and with more holes than a colander. It starts with a guy during his stag night being buried, really buried, by four of his mates. They have been on a pub crawl and admittedly he has had a little more to drink than the perpetrators of this practical joke. But now, consider, the man admits to being claustrophobic, would he for one single moment with a bit of liquor inside him allow himself to be placed in a coffin, have the lid screwed down and earth piled on top of it without putting up an almighty hysterical struggle? He would not only have to be slightly pie-eyed, he would have to be blotto, out like a light, dead to the world as the saying has it and, if that were the case, there would always be the danger that, lying on his back and with a skinful of booze, a possible reflux reaction would more than likely have him drown in his vomit. Be that as it may, leaving him lying there in his slightly inebriated state, the four drive off only to meet with a head on collision that kills them all. There should have been a sixth member of the party, the buried man’s partner in a real estate/construction business but a delayed journey meant he missed the fun but of course, though he denied any knowledge of it to the police, he was in on the joke, in fact as prospective best man, instigated it, and remember it was meant to be purely a joke, that in a couple of hours the guys would return to release their victim, no harm done. The third member of the real estate/construction business is the two guys’ secretary, naturally (this being fiction) the most ravishing blonde bombshell who the buried guy is due to marry that very Saturday, but we discover she is having it off with the partner and they are both expecting, hoping, to their mutual benefit, that number one will die in his coffin. But hold on a minute here, this was not the original plan. The original plan was for him to be released unscathed by his ordeal so how come this has suddenly cropped up? And, if there had not been the road accident and he had been released, then what was plan B? In the meantime, number one is having a two-way conversation from mobile phone to walkie-talkie, found at the accident site by a twenty-six year old with the mind of a six year old and a character I simply could not believe in. The reason he is there plot-wise is because a third villain is listening in to these conversations and traces the whereabouts of the coffin in order to kidnap its inhabitant for a spot of blackmailing. In the process he murders the twenty-six years old, an act of violence that is not explained. In case the twenty-six year old should suddenly get his act together and set a rescue in motion? Who knows? The young man’s corpse of course has to be discovered. Now the blackmailer, having amputated one of number one’s fingers to send to the partner as a warning, telephones him to say he wants him to transfer all the money the two men had placed in a Cayman Island bank account to a Panama bank account the number of which he will give. Failure to comply or go to the police, the usual thing, will entail more bits and pieces of recently buried number one leaving his body. Oh, I nearly forgot, he also had his bollocks electrified so he could scream loud and clear down the telephone wire. Now why doesn’t the partner simply sit back and let events take their natural course, i.e., leave number one to die? The prime object would then have been achieved; he would have his beautiful blonde bombshell and also all the money in the Cayman account still intact. Conscience? The amount the blackmailer wants transferred is exact to the last penny in the Cayman account so why didn’t this ring very loud alarm bells in the partner’s mind? There was only one other person who had this knowledge and it didn’t need a detective or a genius to know who. Unfortunately for the partner this lapse in logical thinking led to him being despatched and the beautiful blonde bombshell and her lover were ready for take off. But the police, who have been suspicious of her all the time of course, are now on to her because they discover a receipt showing she spent a four figure sum up in London buying a state of the art scanner to pick up telephone signals. Now what would she want that expensive piece of equipment for does one suppose? Why, so as her blackmailing lover can trace the site of the coffin in which their victim is buried. But hold on just a cotton picking minute here – in the first place how could they possibly foresee the young man was going to recover the walkie-talkie and this two-way conversation was going to take place anyway to give them a fix on the coffin’s location and, more important, she already knows anyway exactly where it is, has known from the beginning and this I am afraid is the biggest hole of them all.
Far be it for me to denigrate someone’s hard work but what are editors paid for in huge publishing houses?
Happy New Year.