‘Soon. I’ll have you both to supper. It’ll be just the three of us. A tête-à-tête-à-tête.’
So it was that, a fortnight later, I did meet Evadne Mount. Moreover, the moment I watched her stride into Carmen’s living-room, I knew why the meeting had been set up. Evadne Mount was not merely the author of Agatha Christieish whodunits, four of which I had in the meantime unearthed from my local library’s vaults and read with moderate enjoyment, she herself was a character straight out of their stock barrel. Although the evening was humid, she wore a two-piece, oatmeal-hued outfit in the heaviest and hairiest of Scottish tweeds. Her grey stockings were as thick and tight and unappetising as month-old bandages, and her massive feet were encased in the kind of shoes that I would later describe in The Act of Roger Murgatroyd as ‘so sensible you felt like consulting them on whether you should cash in your shares in Amalgamated Copper’. Then there was that voice of hers with its breaking-the-sound-barrier boom, a voice to whose uniqueness, in neither of the whodunits in which I cast her as my heroine, would I prove capable of doing justice. In truth, if I had been a totally free agent, and hadn’t had to worry about her own personal reaction once the books were published, I would have written about it, vulgarly but honestly, that it made her sound as though she were farting through a trumpet.
Somewhat to my surprise, though, I too liked her. We at once struck up a rapport. Even if, as soon as we had been introduced, she started calling me by my first name, standing on the absence of ceremony, so to speak, a liberty I myself never take with strangers, I found that on an unexpectedly wide range of conversational subject-matter – the superiority of Mayhem Parva mysteries to anything of the sort written nowadays, the increasing omnipresence of weirdos and deadbeats in what were once respectable residential areas of London, the charlatanism of almost all contemporary art – our views converged.
While listening to her hold forth, I soon came to the realisation that, as Carmen had foreseen, I definitely could use her as source material for the leading character of my projected whodunit. I even wondered whether it might be possible not merely to adapt her but, in a literal sense, to adopt her – in short, to have Evie herself be my sleuth. Her name, her clothes, the fact that she herself wrote whodunits in a nineteen-thirties style, were just too perfect, for the nostalgist of English eccentricity that I am, to be compromised by the fiction writer’s traditional scruples in such matters (though I was already starting to fantasise how I might actually enhance the anachronistic appeal of those clothes with an accessory that would be distinctive to her, a handbag or a hat, yes, a hat, perhaps a French matelot’s tricorne). Her voice, her galumphing mannerisms, above all her habit, when she, Carmen and I began dishing the latest dirt on the denizens (Evie’s word) of London’s literary scene, of being perpetually reminded of incidents out of her own novels, just as Jane Marple would invoke the trivia of village rumour and gossip when elucidating the ostensibly more recondite set of motivations which lay behind some diabolical metropolitan crime – no, there was no reason at all, it seemed to me, why I couldn’t transpose her, intact, into my own whodunit. Dare I ask her if she would consent to become the model for my fictional sleuth? Would she be offended? She herself was not too wellknown and, if Carmen was to be believed, financially insecure. Naturally, I would be prepared to offer her a decent percentage of my novel’s advance fee and royalties – 25%, say – no, maybe 20% – plenty of time to work out the details. Moreover, if the book turned out to be the success I hoped it would be, it could well re-boot her own languishing career. What had either she or I to lose?
I put my proposition to her. She heard me out, calmly and attentively; the sole sign of what I read as growing enthusiasm on her part was some fidgety play with her pince-nez. It would be my intention, I explained, to name my sleuth ‘Evadne Mount’. I would draw inspiration from her facial features, her gestures and clothing, her entire external appearance. I would allow her character to interrupt the storyline at regular intervals with brief little digests of her own whodunits (whose resident amateur detective, Alexis Baddeley, was also an elderly spinster), some of which, those whose twists I’d refrain from divulging, would indeed be her own, others, those whose twists I would divulge, I’d devise myself, subject to her approval. Finally, I would give her a Watson in the guise of a archetypally plodding Scotland Yard Inspector yet would also guarantee that it was she not he who solved the crime.
All this, I say, I pitched without any more input from her than a repeated twiddling of her pince-nez and a twitch of an eyebrow when, just once, she exchanged a bemused glance with Carmen. Then, when I had fallen silent, prior to saying either yes or no she made two requests.
‘Will I,’ she asked, ‘have the right to expropriate those apocryphal plot digests you mention and develop them as full-length plots for any subsequent whodunits I myself might decide to write?’
That request I hadn’t expected. But, even though a trifle wary and making a mental note to consult my agent, I saw no pressing reason not to grant it and, as I told myself, there would be nothing to prevent me from later changing my mind.
Then: ‘Will I have an absolute veto over anything I take exception to in your description of my appearance or the dialogue you attribute to me?’
‘Ah well, no,’ I answered firmly. ‘No absolute right of veto, I’m afraid. I will, of course, let you read in advance everything in the book relating to you, which, as just about everything in the book will relate to you, basically means that I’ll be showing you the typescript even before my Faber editor sees it. And I will, as I say, subject all of it to your approval, said approval not to be unreasonably withheld, pardon my legalese. But the final decision as to what does or does not go into my novel must rest with me. Being a novelist yourself,’ I craftily added, ‘you ought to understand why that has to be.’
Turning to Carmen, she said, ‘Tell me what you think.’
‘Darling, you can’t possibly expect me to advise you on something so unheard-of. How would I know how to calculate the risks involved? The ramifications? All I will say is that I’ve known Gilbert for many years and I promise you he’s to be trusted. Not for a single moment would he – Actually,’ she ebulliently interrupted herself, ‘what the hell! I will advise you. Go for it, Evie!’
And she did, opining (yes, like one of her own clichéd creations, she actually did opine) that since, whichever decision she took, it was bound to be a mistake, the essential was to make the right mistake, not the wrong one.
Our gentleman’s agreement was sealed with an old-fashioned handshake and an ice-cold bottle of Veuve Clicquot that I suspect Carmen had been keeping in readiness for just such an outcome. And since I already knew what the title of my whodunit would be, I raised my glass and proposed a toast:
‘To The Act of Roger Murgatroyd.’
Up to a point, I stuck to my half of the bargain. A written contract, which we both signed without a qualm, followed our supper together and I dutifully emailed Evie, at evadne-mount@yahoo.co.uk, each chapter as I completed it. I made all of the relatively few minor amendments she insisted upon, mainly having to do with references to her weight but once or twice relating to lines of dialogue she felt were inappropriate to both her factual and fictional selves. She also emailed me in her turn a handful of conceits, most of which I ignored but one I was happy to use, and not simply in compensation for those I wasn’t, that of giving her character the catch-phrase ‘Great Scott Moncrieff!’.