Unfortunately for her, though, which is why I prefixed the preceding paragraph with the qualifier ‘up to a point’, I am less of a writer than, supremely, a rewriter. Writing, I contend, makes a book possible; only rewriting is capable of making it good. For three months after I had delivered my text to Faber, I tirelessly polished it, a process, as ever with me, primarily of excision, ellipsis and elimination, of paring, cropping, thinning out, trimming off and cutting away. But I also seized the opportunity to develop certain internal relationships necessary to what I shall grandly call the narrative’s combinatoric structure.‡
One of these relationships, inspired by Carmen’s revelation of Evie’s long unobtainable and apparently unreadable Lesbian apologia, The Urinal of Futility, involved Evie herself and the stage and screen star Cora Rutherford. Cora was an invented character, of course, named after the actress Margaret Rutherford who (to Agatha Christie’s private vexation) had been hopelessly miscast as Miss Marple in a cycle of film adaptations from the sixties. And, in my revised storyline, she – Cora, that is, not Margaret Rutherford – and Evie were described as having once, during their carefree youth, shared ‘a small cold flat and a big warm bed in Bloomsbury’, before maturing, in Evie’s case, into self-elected spinsterdom and, in Cora’s, into serial heterosexual monogamy.
It wouldn’t exactly be fair to say that I never had any intention of letting Evie, as agreed, vet these late additions. But time pressed, Faber fretted, the printers clamoured, as printers have immemorially done, for the typescript, and my fear was that, if she were to take umbrage and actually demand that I edit them out again, the book’s pre-Christmas publication date, so crucial to its Boxing Day setting, would be compromised. So I never did email them to her. (It happens.)
The book written, our correspondence ceased altogether. Which also meant that, as the date of publication loomed, I was assailed by a sentiment of foreboding that few writers of fiction can ever have known: would Evie take exception to the very novel of which she was the principal character? I actually asked myself whether she would go as far as to injunct the book, whatever that precisely entailed. Or whether she could.
That November The Act of Roger Murgatroyd came out in Britain to wonderful reviews and pretty good sales. Three months previously, in the late summer, Jochen’s translation, Mord auf ffolkes Manor, had been published in Germany, where it became a modest bestseller, never ascending to the top of the top-ten thermometer but for several weeks hovering satisfactorily around sixth or seventh place. Meanwhile, a pair of complimentary copies, both inscribed by me, were dispatched to Evie’s address in Chelsea.
Then nothing. There came no response of any kind. No call, no letter, no email and, needless to say, no legal proceedings either. Evie appeared not to have tried exploiting the success of my book to arrange to have her out-of-print backlist republished. Nor, as she intimated she might, did she ever advise me that it was her intention to borrow one of my counterfeit plotlets to make of it the premise of some new whodunit of her own. To be sure, I might myself have re-opened the lines of communication; yet I was still too nervous to take the initiative of reviving our relationship, such as it had been, and anyway told myself that the ball was in her court. As the weeks passed, my anxieties ebbed without abating altogether.
Delighted with the reception of The Act of Roger Murgatroyd, Walter Donohue, my phlegmatic, soft-spoken editor at Faber, then solicited a sequel. Reluctant at first, I finally agreed to write, for a reason which I justified in its dedication, a second Evadne Mount whodunit, A Mysterious Affair of Style. This time I didn’t once consult her – despite going so far as to have her fictional persona propose marriage to Trubshawe, a narrative development I was especially pleased with, as a twist that had not, like most twists in most whodunits, been preprogrammed into the genre’s genes. I could not help thinking, though, that she might have something rather different to say about it. But, again, I heard nothing.
All of which, dear Reader, should explain why, when I saw Evie rise to her feet in the back row of that lecture hall in Meiringen, my feelings were mixed, to put it mildly, to put it very mildly indeed.
* It’s curious. I would be downright disbelieving if a reader confessed to me to having laughed out loud at any of my jokes on the printed page, yet it’s really quite off-putting when the same jokes, delivered not in print but in person, are met with silence.
† I have included only those questions to which I gave memorable answers.
‡ Like a roller-coaster, even an ‘entertainment’, as The Act of Roger Murgatroyd was subtitled, needs a solid foundation.
Chapter Six
The Q & A over, the room echoed with a communal exhalation of breath, followed by leg stretchings, finger-joint crackings and cigarette-lighter clickings. I inserted my notes between the pages of the copy from which I had read aloud. Folding up his own sheaf of notes, Jochen offered me all the standard reassurances after a public talk of this kind – how well it had gone, how gratifying were both the number and quality of the audience’s questions. I only half-listened to him, distracted as I was by the already forming queue of dedication-seekers anxious for me to inscribe their copies of Die unveröffentlichte Fallsammlung von Sherlock Holmes and other, earlier translated books of mine which had absolutely nothing to do with what Nabokov somewhere describes as ‘a hawk-nosed, lanky, rather likeable private detective’ and weren’t, many of them, even mystery novels. (But one learns not to be picky in these matters. A book sold is a royalty earned.) I was also distracted by my attempts to ascertain what Evie was up to. My field of vision was obscured by diversionary activity, however, and I failed to spot her.
The last of my courtiers having borne off her inscribed copy – ‘To Hildegard With Best Wishes From Gilbert Adair’ – I was finally free to accept a Gauloise from Jochen and a glass of white wine from one of three circulating trays. And there, all of a sudden, she was. Elbowing a path through my fellow writers – I saw Sanary glare at her as his own glass, one he happened to be holding up to the light, was all but knocked out of his hand – she waddled towards me in her crimson suit, for all the world like the Red Queen, twirling her trademark tricorne hat around a chubby forefinger. But wait, hadn’t that hat been one of my inventions? I tried to remember if she had been wearing it at Carmen’s dinner party. Or had she since decided to adopt a few of the manners and mannerisms which I had given her namesake in my book? But she was almost upon me now, so I stepped down off the dais and walked forward to meet her.
‘Holy Rwanda!’ she exclaimed. ‘Or would you prefer “Great Scott Moncrieff!”?’
I laughed lightly. We shook hands, and I continued to hold hers in mine.
‘Evie! Evie, Evie, Evie. I cannot tell you how glad I am to see you. But why didn’t you let me know you were attending the Festival? Or are you by any chance,’ I asked, ‘the famous Mystery Guest?’
‘Me?’ she boomed out, just as I had always had her do in my books, again causing heads to turn, and it instantly dawned on me that the snort I had heard during the Q & A must have been hers. ‘I’m not nearly famous, or mysterious, enough. No, my coming here was one of those last-minute decisions. I arrived just in time to be too late, ha ha! Arrived this very afternoon, as a matter of fact. I missed the opening gala, missed all the speeches, missed practically everything, except of course your reading. As you can imagine, Gilbert, yours was one event I was determined not to miss.’