Free Research by Philip Kerr

go myself. Kashmir, Afghanistan. It might be handy to have someone who knows what some of these ghastly places are actually like. It would save me from having to go. And you’re right. He can write. He wrote those press ads for American Express when Vic Cassel was too pissed to write them himself.’
    ‘They won an award, didn’t they?’
    ‘That’s what encouraged him to think he could become a copywriter in the first place.’ John nodded. ‘Okay, okay. Talk to him. See if he’s interested in my idea.’
    I smiled and did not try to correct him, which I ought to have done, but back then it didn’t really seem to matter whose idea it was, as neither of us had any idea that a convenient working arrangement between two advertising copywriters for one or two books would result in more than thirty
New York Times
bestsellers and sales of more than 175 million books. Only James Patterson and J. K. Rowling sell more. These days, whenever the subject of his squad of co-writers comes up in an interview, John always claims that the idea of employing a back-room of ghost-writers was his and his alone; perhaps it’s what C. P. Snow describes in his novel
The Sleep of Reason
as ‘the hallucinations of fact’. More likely it’s just John being his usual selfish self.
    *
    The following week I gave in my notice at Masius, and four weeks later I started work on the storyline provided by John for a novel that was published the following year as
The Golden Key is Death
 – the first of five novels featuring Dougal Haddon, an ex-SAS officer turned trouble-shooter and mercenary. For a long time I couldn’t believe my own good luck: to get paidto stay at home all morning and write a book, and still have time and energy enough to spend the afternoon writing my own. Pigs in shit do not feel as good about themselves as I did.
    Even before it was published it was clear that John’s new book was destined to be a bestseller – as things turned out it was his first
New York Times
number one – and almost immediately it was finished I started work on the next plot-driven title. I was already making more money than I would have done if I’d been a going-nowhere copywriter at an agency that was held to be the civil service of advertising. For the first time in a long time I was smiling when I got up in the morning.
    Meanwhile, Peter Stakenborg joined John’s new team of writers, followed by a third writer – another ex-copywriter from Ogilvy & Mather called Brian Callaghan – and then a fourth named Philip French, a freelance journalist. Within three years of that lunch at Ormond’s Yard, John Houston employed a team of five writers and was worth more than twenty million pounds. After that John moved first to Jersey for tax reasons – where he met and divorced his second wife, Susan – and then, briefly, to Switzerland, where I believe he still has a house.
    In truth, more or less anyone could write the books, so long as they understood a little about pace and structure, and how to write reasonable dialogue; but only John could edit them so they all read the same, uncomplicated way. It’s not what’s written that makes the difference in John’s books, it’s what doesn’t get written. I quickly learned that the writing is just the connective tissue for John’s stories. He’s very well-read and extremely literate and he can write beautifully constructed prose when he wants to, but there’sa simplicity about his books that reminds me of Picasso; you see, before Picasso, artists painted exactly what they saw, but it was Picasso’s genius to know exactly what you could leave out of a picture; it’s the same with John. Knowing what you can leave out of a book is one reason why he’s so successful and why I have such admiration for what he does.
    While I think I’m a much better writer than John I have never been particularly good at devising a good story, and in the current publishing market it’s story not fine writing