Crime Writers and Other Animals by Simon Brett Read Free Book Online Page B

prison.

THE MAN WHO GOT THE DIRT
    To have killed Bartlett Mears from motives of jealousy would have been a small-minded, petty crime; but fortunately Carlton Rutherford had a much more respectable, wholly practical, reason for eliminating his old rival.
    Murder had not been involved in his original plans for settling old scores, but Carlton Rutherford felt not the tiniest twinge of regret when he realized it would be necessary. In a sense, it would tie together a lot of ends otherwise doomed to eternal looseness.
    The rivalry between the two writers had lasted nearly forty years, and though Bartlett Mears, had he been questioned on the subject, would have dismissed it with a characteristic shrug, for Carlton Rutherford the wound had never healed, and its scab required daily repicking.
    Both had written their first novels at the end of the fifties. By then Kingsley Amis, John Osborne and others, burglarizing the shrine of pre-war British values and shattering its first hollow images, had declared the open season for iconoclasm.
    Carlton Rutherford, at that period climbing the North Face of a doctorate on George Gissing at the University of Newcastle, had used his spare time to good effect and written his first novel,
Neither One Thing Nor The Other
.
    This was a work of searingly fashionable nihilism, the story of Bob Grantham, a working-class genius, son of a postman in Salford, who struggled, against the odds of misunderstanding parents and virginity-hugging girls, all the way up to university. The book contrived to pillory traditional educational values, and at the same time potentially to alienate everyone with whom the author had come into contact in the twenty-five years he had been alive.
    And therein lay its problem. Bob Grantham was so patently the
alter ego
– in fact, not even the
alter ego
, just the
ego
– of Carlton Rutherford that all of the book’s other characters became readily identifiable.
    Dashiel Loukes, the lean and hungry literary agent to whom (randomly from a reference book in a Newcastle library) the manuscript had been sent, confided to its author over a boozy lunch at Bertorelli’s in Charlotte Street, that, though he was ‘excited, but very excited’ about the book, he was ‘just a tidge worried’ about the libel risk. And thought a little bit of rewriting might be prudent.
    That had been in 1958. Though simplified by the death of both Carlton Rutherford’s parents in a charabanc crash soon after his meeting with Loukes (you cannot libel the dead), the rewriting had proved unexpectedly difficult and time-consuming.
    Eventually, a year later, at another Bertorelli’s lunch, the author presented the agent with a revised manuscript, announcing that he had contrived to disguise all of the living characters save for that of Sandra, the toffee-nosed solicitor’s daughter who had proved so tragically insensitive to the exceptional genius of Bob Grantham and so provincially unwilling to be the recipient of his extremely tenacious virginity.
    Dashiel Loukes, thin and acute as a greyhound, had asked how closely this character resembled its original, and dragged from Carlton Rutherford the unwilling admission that, except for the detail of having had her eyes changed from blue to brown, Sandra was identical in every particular to Sylvia, a toffee-nosed solicitor’s daughter who had proved tragically insensitive to the exceptional genius of Carlton Rutherford and provincially unwilling to be the recipient of his extremely tenacious virginity (still, though Carlton did not mention the fact, intact in 1959).
    The agent, aware that in
Neither One Thing Nor The Other
he had a fashionable and marketable commodity, suggested an extreme solution to the problem. The author should send a copy of his manuscript to Sylvia/Sandra and ask her to give a written undertaking that she would not take any action if the book were published. They had nothing to lose; it was worth a