Free Dr. Yes by Colin Bateman

depressed about her fading looks, and had
retained the card so that he could phone up and ask how she was getting on.
        There
was a small pocket at the back of the wallet containing a crumpled, yellowed
clipping from The Times. It was Augustine's entry in their One Hundred
Masters of Crime Fiction supplement. I had had him on his pedestal for so long
that I had ignored the truth of his writing career - he was a failure. Of
course it depended, like the fish, how you defined failure. If just writing
well was enough, then he wasn't one. But he was self-published. He was out of
print. Outside of devoted aficionados of the genre he was completely
unrecognised. He had no career. He had started out the way nearly all
writers do, and I'd seen it a hundred times - amateurs transformed into
gibbering wrecks by actually being published; what once they'd done for fun
ruined for ever by the burden of expectation, the hope of sales and good
reviews and riches, hobbyists turned authors made bitter by the knowledge that
they'd missed their main chance. I'd met grown men who were only saved from
complete insanity by the fact that they were the twenty-third best-selling
crime writer in Lithuania. But because Augustine had been local to me, because
he had impacted on me, I had elevated him above the morass of writers who are
good for a couple of books and then fade back into richly deserved obscurity;
because he had been a flickering candle in the darkness of a troubled Belfast,
I had exaggerated his worth and impact. He was a failure, and he'd taken the
coward's way out. If he was remembered at all, it would be for blowing his head
off in a house belonging to the owner of No Alibis, who, actually, was much
better known in the crime- writing community than he ever would be.
         I was the star all along.
        I was
the one who should be sitting back content at what I had achieved. I should
have been the one puffing on a cigar, not bloody Augustine Wogan. Oooooh, my
wife's disappeared, she must obviously have been murdered, it couldn't be that
I'm just a disaster and she's had enough of me. I picked up his cigar and
held it up. I would obviously not put it in my mouth; his spit was probably
still upon it. But I quite happily mimed it. I lifted the cigar cutter and
pretended to cut off the end; I pretended to puff upon it, and then sat back,
like the satisfied, successful champion of crime fiction that I was, and waxed
lyrical to an imaginary audience about the greats of the genre, Americans
mostly, with a sprinkling of English and French, no mention at all for the
Scandinavians, obviously, and certainly not for a loser like Augustine Wogan,
except to mention that he had blown his head off in my own shop, driven mad by
the success of what he incorrectly perceived to be less talented authors than
himself.
        Much
as cigarettes distress me, I have never minded the smell of a cigar. My father
smoked them, although always from the cheaper end of the market, usually
Woolworth's, and he always had a lingering whiff of them about him. Mother
smoked them as well, but that's another story. This one smelled richer,
more exotic. The lovely Arabella had money, so it was more than likely
hand-rolled in Cuba or Brazil rather than mass-produced on an industrial estate
in Reading. Perhaps as soon as Augustine saw the picture of her with Dr Yes he
knew it was the end of the line, that quality cigars were a thing of the past.
Although in that case, why not savour the whole thing, rather than blow his
head off after just a couple of puffs? Maybe this wasn't the last of his
expensive cigars, but the first of a lesser brand, a bitter taste of how life
was to be post-Arabella.
         Maybe.
Maybe. Maybe .
        I'm a
terrible one for having to know things, but it's what I do and am. I set the
cigar down and went upstairs. Although No Alibis is crammed with tens of
thousands of crime books, and there are many more thousands here in the