Peter James
Dead Letter Drop
To Georgina, my bride of one novel,
for courage, for strength, for patience
and above all for love
Does the Eagle know what is in the pit
Or wilt thou go ask the Mole?
FOREWORD
Welcome to my first published novel, which crept, unseen and unnoticed, onto the bottom shelves at the rear of a handful of bookshops kind enough to stock it back in 1981 — and remained there, mostly unsold. I remember WH Smith, out of the goodness of their hearts, taking a grand total of thirty copies — a far cry from the 30,000 they would take of books that were destined for the bestseller lists! But I am still hugely grateful to them for giving a total unknown the kudos of being able to say, ‘Ah, yes, WH Smith stock it, actually!’
It was rejected by the first publisher who read it, New English Library, headed by Nick Webb. Seven years later, in 1988, he was to surprise me by outbidding all other UK publishers for my supernatural thriller Possession. The second publisher, to my joy and delight, bought it. WH Allen paid a princely £2,000 — not a lot of money even in those days.
It was not the first novel that I had written — I wrote three between 1967 and 1970 which, luckily, were never published at all, much to my dismay back then. The first was titled Ride Down a Roller Coaster and it was inspired by my hero at the time, a young writer called Adam Diment who wrote three massively successful, racy, spy thrillers — The Dolly Dolly Spy, The Great Spy Race and The Bang Bang Birds — which enabled him to live a Champagne lifestyle in his mid-twenties and drive an Aston Martin, a car I coveted above all others. Roller Coaster wasn’t a spy thriller; it was a kind of rake’s progress to disaster through the pop and drug world of my own teen era, the 1960s.
Unlike Adam Diment’s first book, mine was turned down by an endless succession of UK agents and publishers. A friend who read it told me it might appeal more to American tastes than British. I bought a copy of The Writers’and Artists’ Year Book and singled out a New York agent, Kurt Hellmer, who had one of the largest entries. Ever hopeful, I dutifully photocopied the manuscript and airmailed it to him. Imagine my surprise when six weeks later I received an airmail letter (this was in the days before that wonderful technology called fax) containing eight pages of effusive praise telling me I was a wonderful writer, but the book needed some editorial work, after which he was confident it would be published — and listing his thoughts with copious notes. But by then, now at film school, I was nearly at the end of my second novel Atom Bomb Angel (a title I was to use again over a decade later for my second published novel).
I sent him the new manuscript, but he replied that he didn’t like it as much as Roller Coaster and please would I consider his notes. However, I had then started work on my third novel, a zany comedy titled Bethlehem Where Are You? Kurt hated this book with a vengeance and told me to go back to Roller Coaster. By now I had graduated from film school and emigrated to Canada, where I got a job, through a stroke of luck, at a Toronto television station, writing a daily programme for pre-school children called Polka Dot Door. I wrote proudly to Hellmer telling him the news. Within days I had a very snarky letter back from him, telling me to quit this job if I was serious about a career as a novelist, as I would never write a novel if I was writing for a day job. He advised me to get a job in a library or a factory.
I ignored his advice, Roller Coaster remained an unfinished project and instead I turned my energies to making films — starting with writing and producing a series of low-budget horrors, and then a comedy called Spanish Fly, starring Terry-Thomas and Leslie Phillips, which came out in 1976 to disastrous reviews. Barry Norman, then the doyen of all film critics, called it ‘The worst British film since the Second World War and the least funny British funny film ever made.’ I have the framed review hanging proudly in my office today!
Spanish Fly, in which I had invested myself heavily, wiped me out financially, and I was unsure what to do to recover. At this time my father and mother were running our successful family business, Cornelia James, Glovemakers to the Queen, with a factory in Brighton. My father became ill with heart trouble and they were thinking of selling the business. I realized that, having not made it as a writer, and being in a parlous financial state, it would be sensible to go into the business, which would at least give me a decent living. So I went to work in the factory, dimly remembering the advice of my agent, the lovely, patient Kurt Hellmer.
My then wife, and several friends who knew of my novel-writing ambitions, kept asking me if I was still going to try to achieve my dream of getting a book published. I was twenty-eight and it was a wake-up call. But what to write? Then, by chance, I read an article in The Times saying that with Adam Diment having stopped writing, and with Ian Fleming long dead, there was now an acute shortage of racy spy thrillers. It was a light-bulb moment for me!
I knew one person who had worked in the security services, Vanessa Gebbie, now a successful novelist in her own right, who had once been a secretary in MI5. Although restricted in what she could tell me, I gleaned enough from her, and from reading a raft of fiction and non-fiction about MI5 and MI6, to have some idea of the world of spooks. I also had, buzzing in my head, an idea for an opening scene for a novel — but no idea where to take it from there.
So I wrote the scene — a man and a girl wake in his New York apartment, after a raunchy night, to find someone breaking into the room, who then, immediately and inexplicably, commits suicide. Unlike my Roy Grace novels, which I plot meticulously and always know the ending I want to arrive at, I had no idea what would happen next. So I just kept writing and writing and writing. Finally, in 1979, I finished the book. I titled it A Pink Envelope with a Bright Blue Bow.
I photocopied it and airmailed it to my agent, Kurt Hellmer, who I had not spoken to since 1971. Two months went by without hearing a word from him. I finally phoned his number and got a dead line tone. After several more phone calls, I learned that he had died six years earlier. I guess dead agents aren’t a lot of use…!
I was recommended, through a brilliant entertainments industry lawyer, Bob Storer of Harbottle and Lewes, two agents. One was Debbie Owen, totally delightful, but clearly not that hungry as she was Jeffrey Archer’s agent. The other, Jon Thurley, was just starting out on his own, and I was told he was hungry. Four days after I mailed him the book he phoned me to say he wanted to represent me, but I needed to change the title. Two months later I had the publishing deal I had always dreamed of, but never dared to believe would actually happen.
One of the strangest — and nicest — things about my writing career is that I have so often found myself writing about subjects that subsequently — entirely coincidentally — become major news, as with my fifth Roy Grace novel, Dead Tomorrow, which is about the murky world of the international trafficking of human organs. Dead Letter Drop is about the discovery of a mole deep within MI5. Within days of signing my publishing deal, the scandal of Anthony Blunt broke. A senior member of MI5, he had been exposed as a spy for Russia.
I hope you have as much fun reading Dead Letter Drop as I did writing it. Take it with a pinch of salt and please don’t judge me too harshly!