Philip Kerr - Research

‘Which one?’

‘The Range Rover.’

I smiled. Got that one right. ‘Okay. I’ll see you on Monday. Goodbye.’

‘Goodbye, monsieur.’

Goodbye. Easy. I never quite bought that last line in Chandler’s The Long Goodbye : ‘I never saw any of them again — except the cops. No way has yet been invented to say goodbye to them.’ What does that mean? People give the cops the brush-off all the time; and if anyone was equal to the task of doing it for real it was surely John Houston; the man was very resourceful. Still, Chandler’s is a great title. One of the best I’d say. That and The Big Sleep . Sometimes a good title helps you to write the novel. I wasn’t at all happy with the title of my own novel. I wasn’t happy with the beginning. And I certainly wasn’t happy with the hero — he was too much like me: dull and pompous with a strong streak of pedantry. John was always picking me up for that when, earlier in our working relationship, he read a draft I’d written for one of his own books:

‘As usual you’ve made the hero much too professorial, Don. He’s a bit cold. Not likeable at all. You need to go back and make us like him more.’

‘I don’t know how to do that.’

‘Sure you do, old sport. Give him a pet dog. Better still let him find an abandoned kitten. Or have him call his mother up. That always works. Or maybe there’s a kid he knows who he gives a few bucks to now and then. People like that. Shows he’s got a heart.’

‘It’s a bit obvious isn’t it?’

‘This isn’t Nicholson Baker, Don. We don’t sweat the small stuff. We tell it how it is in broad strokes, and people can take it or leave it. I’m not much interested in the finer aspects of characterization any more than I am in winning the Man Booker Prize. We’re not writing for Howard Jacobson or Martin Amis.’

‘But he’s supposed to be a ruthless killer, John.’

‘That’s right.’

I shrugged. ‘Which would imply a degree of unlikeability. Did people like the Jackal in Forsyth’s novel?’

‘I did,’ said John. ‘The Englishman, as Freddie more often calls him, is bold and audacious. Yes, he is cool and self-contained and a cold-blooded killer. But he also has style and considerable charm. Remember that French bird he shags when he’s on the run. When he’s with her he’s a bit like James Bond. Smooth and full of smiles. Charm will take a character a long way. Even when he’s also a bastard. Until I fix them your characters tend to lack charm, Don. A bit like you.’

He chuckled at his little joke.

‘It’s there — the old army officer charm — but you keep it hidden, old sport. It’s buried deep along with a lot of other shit. Look, Don, if we’re going to spend three hundred pages with this guy we have to like him a bit. If you write a biography of Himmler you at least have to find him interesting, right? So, it’s the same with this guy in the novel. He has to be someone you might want to have a beer with. That’s the key to any successful character in fiction, Don. No matter who he is, no matter what he’s done, he has to be someone you might want to sit with in a bar. If it comes to that it’s also how you get elected to be the President of the United States, or the Prime Minister of Great Britain. For that to happen you have to look like someone to have a drink with.’

‘Right.’

‘Remember what we did with Jack Boardman?’

Then there were only two, but Jack Boardman became the hero of six novels, of which the most recent was The Second Archangel: A Jack Boardman Story .

‘Yes, I think so.’

‘We based him on your best friend at Sandhurst. What was his name? Piers something or other? The one who was a lieutenant in the Parachute Regiment.’

‘Piers Perceval.’

‘That’s right. I asked you what it was you liked about Piers and we drew up a list of all the things that made him seem like such a good bloke. And then I suggested you stick to that when you were writing about Jack Boardman. I told you to always be asking yourself, what would Piers have done in a situation like this? If Piers slept with this woman what would he say to her afterward? If Piers was going to tell a joke what kind of joke would it be? That kind of thing. It’s how we put Jack Boardman together.’

‘Yes, I’d forgotten that.’

‘So. Think of another friend. And base this new character on him. Steal him, if you like. Steal him like a body snatcher. Simple.’

The trouble was that after writing almost forty books for John, I’d used up all of my own friends — and quite a few of my ex-wife’s — so that there was no one left I could use now for my own novel. I could hardly use Piers Perceval again. After six Jack Boardman books I never wanted to think about or see Piers again. So it was probably just as well that he had been dead for more than thirty years.

I badly missed John’s suggestions on how to improve what I’d written — he was brilliant at doing that. This is different from mere editing; in my experience most editors can tell you what is wrong with a page of writing but have little or no clue how to fix it. That’s why they’re editors and not writers, I suppose. Constructive criticism is the most difficult thing to give any writer. But mostly I missed John’s carefully researched story outlines. These were 75-page outlines of as yet unwritten books, with research appendices, maps and photographs — story epitomes in which all of the questions had been asked and answered — bound in red leather with purple silk bookmarks and their titles lettered in gold. Which seemed only appropriate: each of John’s outlines was worth about four million dollars. Unlike my own novel; the way things were going I would be lucky to sell it at all.

On the face of it the restaurant at Claridge’s did not augur well; there was something about the art deco room with its purple chairs, high marble ceilings, telescopic peach lampshades and modern carpet that made me feel slightly nauseous. Maybe it was the prospect of dining with two French policemen, but the restaurant looked like the dining room on a passenger-liner that was about to sink.

The maître d’ led me to a table where two men got to their feet and shook me by the hand. Amalric was a weary-looking man with grey hair, a neat, grey moustache and beard, and a good navy-blue suit with a custom lining, pocket silk handkerchief and Hermès tie that made him seem more like a banker. His sergeant, Didier Savigny, was about twenty years younger, with a shaven head and altogether more muscular; his suit was less expensive than his superior’s but rather more fashionable, which is to say the jacket was cut a little too short for my taste and made his arms stick out like a chimp’s. Each of them handed me a nicely printed business card with the embossed gold seal of the principality and which I read politely.

‘Rue Notari,’ I said. ‘Why does that seem familiar to me?’

‘It’s close to the main harbour of Monaco,’ explained Amalric. ‘Your boss’s boat, the Lady Schadenfreude , is moored less than fifty metres from police headquarters, on the other side of the Stade Nautique swimming pool. You can actually see the bridge of the boat from my office window.’

‘That’s handy,’ I said. I collected the menu off the table and ordered a glass of champagne from the waiter. It’s not often you get taken out for an expensive dinner by the police.

‘You know Monaco?’ asked Savigny. He reminded me a little of Zinedine Zidane. Tanned, muscular, not very patient. From the look of him I imagined his shaven head would feel every bit as hard butting against my sternum as the Marseille-born footballer’s.