G Malliet - Death and the Lit Chick

He demurred. She persisted. St. Just quickly was persuaded that persistence was her calling card.

"Don't be shy," she said. She now twirled a strand of the white-blonde hair around one finger, giggled up and down the scale, and gave her head another toss for good measure. "Cultivate the fans-that's totally what these conferences are for."

St. Just smiled feebly. "I don't have fans. I'm a cop."

She paused, mid-twirl. "Then whatever are you doing here?"

"It's rather a long story."

She emitted a girlish squeal and with an expression of mock horror, threw up her hands and said, "The Bill! Ooh! I surrender!" There was more in this vein and then, rescue mission forgotten, she giggled again and spun off in search of her publicist, who "was supposed to be arranging an interview with the Scotsman. I don't know what I pay him for. How am I supposed to finish this book if I have to do his job, too?"

As she strode away on champagne-stem heels, a bedraggled Annabelle Pace crossed his line of vision, carrying a plastic bag bulging with about a dozen books.

"You've been shopping, I see."

She nodded. "One has to keep up with trends, however appalling they may be. I never thought I'd say this," she added, "but 'poor Jay.'"

Nodding in the direction of the besieged agent, she said, "He doesn't need this grief. He certainly doesn't need the money, nor the publicity. I wonder why he's here at all."

"Looking to recruit new talent?" said St. Just.

"You're joking, right? He's probably got more successful clients than he can handle now. Besides, agents never come to these things looking for talent. But would you turn down a free holiday?"

Splinter groups were now forming around people Annabelle identified as late-arriving publishers and magazine editors.

"They're trying to get on the publishers' lists or finagle a book review," Annabelle informed him. "Oh! See that grey-haired man, the toff who looks like Ian Richardson? That's Julius Easterbrook, the publisher. My host and yours, in case you haven't yet met him."

Watching the sycophantic crowd, and thinking of the hundreds of books he'd just seen at the booksellers' stalls, St. Just said, "It's a funny business you're in. Constantly writing about murder."

"Are you wondering, in your professional capacity, if we're ever tempted to take it that one step further -cue sinister harpsichord music?" asked Annabelle. "The answer is no. Writers are observers, not doers, Hemingway being the rare exception. We don't, as a rule, engage in anything so… proactive as murder. Especially crime writers. Completely lacking a spine for that sort of thing, I would have said."

"But you're forgetting," he replied. "Crime writers are people, too."

She looked about them. In one corner, an author was whinging to his publisher about the "puny print runs" for his book, "which would otherwise have been a best-seller." In another, a woman surreptitiously added a tot of brandy from a hip flask to her morning coffee. A scruffy-looking man in an overcoat was taking down one of the booksellers, who had apparently committed the mortal sin of forgetting to stock the author's books.

"Only in the most elastic sense of the term," she told him.

Annabelle soon left him to discuss contracts, and St. Just began walking about, sipping his juice and trying to look as though he belonged. He'd never known how to "work" a room, which often left him at the mercy of whatever bore latched onto him, but he had learned how to move quickly and purposefully through a crowd so as not to be waylaid. As he did so, he came across Magretta, enthroned in an armchair, interview with Quentin Swope underway. She was apparently just wrapping up a defense of the mystery genre, and the enduring fascination of reading about others being done to death in outrageous and implausible ways.

"Would you not say it is true that good writers can no longer find a platform, especially in America?" St. Just heard Quentin ask. "That they're being ignored in favor of the few, reliable blockbuster writers?"

"Not at all," Magretta replied frostily. "The blockbuster writers like Kimb-I mean, these newcomers, some of whom are here with us today, will be forgotten in twenty years' time, you mark my words. While the carefully crafted suspense novel, such as I write, will, like the pyramids, withstand the test of the ages."

Registering that Magretta had actually failed to answer the question, St. Just strode briskly past, gathering odd scraps of conversation as he went.

"You have to have a corpse by page fifty-seven. Page seventy at the absolute outside."

"Says who?"

"Why, so says everyone. It's the industry standard."

"Industry standard? What are we writing here? CliffsNotes or crime novels?"

Another group, this one dominated by a man in green golf slacks. Surely a soul mate for Magretta, or her lost twin.

"Prologues are so last year. Did you read that pointless, winding thing in Magretta's last book?"

Or, perhaps not.

A few steps further brought him to a redoubtable woman sporting a pince-nez and a brocade waistcoat.

"The murder has to take place in the first five pages. Otherwise, the readers lose interest."

"Are they suffering from attention deficit disorder, or what? I mean, surely these decisions depend on the requirements of the story one is trying to tell."

"I'm telling you. Monique's last book didn't have the murder until page twenty. The returns positively flooded back to the publisher."

"That's just ridiculous. The book didn't sell because it was rubbish."

And a bit later:

"Fifty? Honey, she's sixty-five if she's a day. Hell, her author photo is practically a daguerreotype."

Another group was discussing the famous Hercule Poirot.

"All those giant marrows," said one. "I mean, really. One can't escape the symbolism. And Miss Marple, with her knitting-"

Just then the conference organizer, Rachel Twalley, whizzed by, an hysterical gleam in her eyes, just avoiding a collision with a ginger-haired man in granny glasses.

"Have you ever noticed how serial killers always think in italics?"

One conversation he overheard that later seemed significant was when his orbit brought him past Tom Brackett and Lord Easterbrook, Tom leaning in confrontationally, hands on hips.

"It's not blackmail if no money changes hands," Tom hissed at the older man.

"Extortion, then. And I've had enough of whatever you choose to call it. If Kimberlee goes, everything's changed. You must realize that. I may well be bankrupt next year."

"Don't give me that crap. You've got more money than Croesus."

St. Just missed the rest of the conversation, a jam having formed in earnest near the ballroom, resulting in some genteel shoving and elbow-pushing. The throng eventually swept St. Just through the door and deposited him inside, where Rachel Twalley and several other dignitaries were arranged on a dais behind a long, cloth-covered table. The seated audience members alternated between rubber-necking and studying their programs as intently as scholars decoding the Dead Sea scrolls. St. Just, finding a seat near the back, hoped no one would hold him responsible for "Bad Boys."

Rachel stood and bustled to the podium, rather in the unto-the-breach attitude of a suffragette about to chain herself to the gates of Parliament. Gripping the microphone as if it were a lifeline attached to a rescue helicopter-"Testing! Testing! Can you hear me in the back?" (St. Just felt sure they could hear her in the North Pole)-she launched into her opening remarks.

"The crime novel, once the poor stepchild of literature, has at last been crowned, thanks to all of you who gather here yearly to raise the fallen flag and rally the troops to the side of the immortal Agatha, the inimitable Ngaio, the sublime Dorothy-our Great Softboiled Ladies of Mystery-and their hardboiled cousins: Hammett, Chandler, and Cain."