Free Research by Philip Kerr Page A

that sells. This is the other reason John is so successful at what he does: he’s the most story-led person I’ve ever met. John once told me that he never goes looking for new plots because they always seem to find him; to that extent they’re like orphans, he says, looking for a good home, or perhaps electrons looking to attach themselves to a vulnerable nucleus. For this reason he never goes anywhere without one of his little Smythson notebooks in which he is forever jotting ideas down – the notebooks even have the word GENIUS printed on the covers in gold letters, and he’s got a whole boxful of them; sometimes he just jots down some things a character might say, or plot-points, but just as often a plot will come to him wholly formed, as if a stork had delivered them to his desk like Dumbo the elephant. John is the kind of person who could find you a good plot from the in-flight magazine on the plane and famously did with one of his earlier novels,
The Liberty to Know
; incidentally, the film rights on that one were bought by Jerry Bruckheimer for two million dollars.
    When she divorced him, John’s second wife alleged that his constant note-taking was a kind of obsessive compulsive disorder; she even alleged that he had stolen some of her own ideas and passed these off as his own intellectual property; but that’s another story.
    Somewhere along the line I published my own first novel –
Dreams of Heaven on the Falls Road
 – which limped into print and was quickly remaindered, then forgotten. Which is the fate of most novels, of course, and the normal condition for any writer is to be rejected or to be out of print; this is what I tell myself – that being a published writer is a bit like what Schopenhauer says about life itself: non-existence is our natural condition. Unless, of course, you’re John Houston. Because make no mistake about it, what John Houston does is very rare indeed; to make money by your writing is incredibly difficult. To that extent John Houston is truly one of the greats and the living embodiment of what Andy Warhol meant when he said that good business is the best art.
    When John read my novel and noted my disappointment at its cool reception he gave me his own critical reaction, which was a little less F. R. Leavis and a bit more Jack Regan:
    ‘Forget about it, old sport – that’s my advice. Forget about this and write another; that’s what separates the men from the boys; any dumb fuck can start writing a novel – and they frequently do – but very few can finish writing one; and there are even fewer who can put that novel behind them and start another. The important thing is to learn from your mistakes. My opinion is that your novel is beautifully written and very atmospheric but too often you seem like you’re peeking across your shoulder to see if any of those bloody clever writers you say you admire are paying attention to your nice, pretty sentences. The Martins and the Julians and the Salmans. The trouble is your story doesn’t stay afloat. About halfway through it’s as if you forgot where you put it. It’s almost like you were shagging some bird and even while you were doing it you decided you didn’t want to shag her any more. With your next one you’ve got to work outthe story and everything about the story and nothing but the fucking story before you start writing a goddamn word, after which everything becomes subordinate to that. More importantly you have got to learn to tell Martin and Julian and Salman to go and fuck themselves.’
    *
    Someone’s mobile was ringing out a tune – a piece of tinny piano music I vaguely recognized. Sergeant Savigny got up from the table and left the half-empty restaurant to answer his
portable
. I tasted the wine and then frowned, trying to place the clunking melody.
    ‘You don’t like the wine?’
    ‘The wine is excellent. No, it’s the ringtone that’s perplexing me.’
    ‘Irritating, isn’t it?’ said