Paul Johnson - The Death List

The contact page on my Web site was connected to my inbox. For the time being. I was struggling to pay the bill, so www.MattStonecrimenovelsofdistinction.com wouldn’t be online for much longer. When my books were selling, I used to get up to five messages a day from fans bursting to tell me how much they loved my work. Now that I wasn’t the apple of any publisher’s eye, I was lucky if I got five a week. But I lived in hope. There was nothing like a bit of undiluted praise to crank the creative engine.

After I’d deleted the usual cumshot and cheap drugs spam, I looked at what was left. A brief mail from the reviews editor of one of the lad mags I contributed to. I’d sent him a message begging for work and here he was informing me that my services were not required this month. Great. That went the same way as the spam. Then there was yet another message from WD. I had to hand it to him or her. No, it had to be a guy-he knew too much music and movie trivia. He was as loyal as it got. And as regular. Three times a week for the past two months. I had foolishly made a commitment on my Web site to reply to every message, so I’d kept the correspondence going. But WD had a solicitous way with words and I’d made my feelings about some of the issues he raised clear enough. In short, I’d given him a glimpse of the real me.

I double-clicked on the inbox icon and went into the file I’d made for WD-giving all my correspondents their own file was another displacement activity that had kept me going for days.

I ran down the messages, opening some of them. They had started off as standard fan stuff-Dear Matt (hope first name terms are acceptable!), Really enjoyed your Sir Tertius series. Great depictions of Jacobean London. Squalor and splendor, wealth and violence. My favorite is The Revenger’s Comedy. When’s there going to be another one? To which I’d replied, with the deliberate vagueness that I used to cultivate when I had a publishing contract, Who knows, my friend? When the Muse takes me. Dickhead.

WD was also one of the few people who liked my second series. After writing three novels set in 1620s London featuring “the resourceful rake” Sir Tertius Greville, I’d decided to pull the plug on him. The books had done pretty well-good reviews (sarcasm and irony, always my strong suits, turned a lot of reviewers on); The Italian Tragedy had won an award from a specialist magazine for best first novel; I’d had plenty of radio and TV exposure (admittedly mostly on local channels) and I’d done dozens of bookshop events.

Then, for reasons I still didn’t fully understand, I had decided that “A Trilogy of Tertius” was enough. I wanted to jump on the bandwagon of crime fiction set in foreign countries. I didn’t know it at the time, but jumping on bandwagons is a talent possessed only by the very brave or the very lucky. I was neither. My choice of country probably didn’t help. WD wrote, Your private eye Zog Hadzhi is a superb creation. Who would have thought that a detective would prosper in the anarchy of post-communist Albania? I particularly enjoyed Tirana Blues. Very violent, though. I suppose you must have seen some terrible things on your research trips out there. I didn’t tell him that I’d never been near the benighted country and that all I knew I’d learned in the local library. No one seemed to realize. The critics were still approving (apart from a scumbag called Alexander Drys who called Zog “an underwear-sniffer”), but sales plummeted from the start. By the time my intrepid hero had defeated the Albanian Mafia in the second novel, Red Sun Over Durres, they were down to a couple of thousand and my overworked editor had declined any further offerings from me.

I’d known the series was in trouble from the start. There was a strong correlation between falling sales and the number of e-mails from fans. But I hadn’t expected my publishers to deposit me in the dustbin of unwanted authors with such alacrity. After all, they’d invested in me for five books and I was already planning a new departure to get myself back on track. But they were more interested in twentysomethings with pretty faces and, if at all possible, blond hair, rather than a thirty-eight-year-old former music journalist whose looks could at best be described as rugged and whose author photograph had scared more than one sensitive child.

Never mind, Matt, WD had said. You have so much talent that I know you’ll be back in print soon. James Lee Burke went unpublished for years. And look at Brian Wilson. Decades of silence and then a great new album. He was trying to help, but he didn’t succeed. I didn’t have five percent of Burke’s talent and, besides, I’d never liked the Beach Boys’ warblings.

Normally authors who have been dropped by their publishers do their best to keep that fact from their readers. Not me. In what my ex-wife described as “a career-terminating act that Kurt Cobain would have been proud of,” I decided to air my grievances in the columns of a broadsheet newspaper. I’d met the literary editor at a party and I thought he’d be interested in an insightful piece on the cutthroat nature of the modern publishing business. He was, but not for the reasons I’d assumed. I bitched about how much money my publishers had invested in me only to cut their losses before I made the big time, I whined about how the author’s appearance was more important than a skilled turn of phrase, and I looked back nostalgically to the weeks I’d spent on the road chatting up booksellers-all thrown away at the whim of a callous managing director. Controversy flowed for almost a week, and then the literary world moved on to more pressing issues (the next bald footballer’s ghosted biography, the kiss-and-tell story of a large-bosomed singer). And, too late, I realized that, by deploying my cannon as loosely as a blind-drunk pirate captain, I’d made myself unpublishable. Smart move. It got worse. A few days later my agent, a rapacious old dandy called Christian Fels, sent me an e-mail in which he graciously relinquished his representation of me. I had hit rock bottom. No publisher, no agent, no income.

At least WD remained supportive. Loved your piece in the paper, Matt. Such a shame the people running publishing are so shortsighted. So what if so-called experts like Dr. Lizzie Everhead tear you to shreds in public. Don’t lose heart. There’s a story out there waiting for you to write! Typical nonwriter, I thought. Stories didn’t hang around like pythons waiting to ambush passing writers. Stories were in writers’ heads, hidden away like lodes of precious metal. You had to dig deep and hard to find them, and I wasn’t up to that anymore. I was too dispirited, too cynical, too ground down. I could have done without being reminded of Lizzie Everhead, as well. She was a poisonous academic who’d taken exception to my use of the Jacobean setting in the Tertius books. She and Alexander Drys were my biggest hate-objects.

Then I clicked open WD’s latest message and entered a world of pain and torment.

Something I’d noticed as I scrolled down the messages in WD’s file was that the e-mail address was always different. I’d been aware of that before, but I hadn’t paid much attention, assuming my correspondent was the kind of cheapskate who jumped from Microsoft to Google to Yahoo, setting up free accounts and giving himself all sorts of different identities for fun. Except WD was always WD, no matter what his e-mail server was. This time he was WD1612@hotmail. com.

Dear Matt, I read. Hope you’re well. I’ve made the most interesting discovery. You haven’t been honest with me! There I was thinking that your name was Matt Stone and now I find that you’re actually called Matt Wells.

That was interesting. I’d never revealed my real name anywhere on my site or in the media. I was a music journalist before I started writing novels, and I wanted to keep my two professions separate. I had the feeling that people who read my interviews with the Pixies and my career assessments of Neil Young and Bob Dylan might not be too impressed by the fact that I also wrote crime novels. I should have realized that being embarrassed about what I did was a bad sign. But the point was, how the hell had WD uncovered my real name?