Close to Death

I had always liked the security of a multiple book deal. It effectively meant that I was being paid for four bites of the cherry. Even if my next book was a disaster, I’d be guaranteed three more. Most writers live with what is known as ‘imposter syndrome’, a chronic fear that at any moment they’ll be found out and their books will be unceremoniously taken off the shelves and pulped, reduced to a milky white substance that will then be reconstituted into new paper and used for somebody else’s book. My deal pushed that possibility further into the future.

The downside was that it tied me to my publisher, making me almost a full-time employee. It committed me to another lorry-load of words, three hundred thousand of them, or maybe even five hundred thousand by the time I’d done second drafts and edits. It was a mountain to climb, and given that Hawthorne hadn’t so much as sent me an email or a text since Harriet Throsby’s killer had been arrested (life in jail with a minimum of twenty-three years), I couldn’t so much as take the first step. It was as if I was suffering from somebody else’s writer’s block.

I flicked on the kettle and considered what Hilda had suggested. An old case . . . a murder that Hawthorne had solved before he had forced his way into my life. It did have some attractions.

It would be much easier to write. All the facts would have been set out, the clues assembled, the killer already known. This would be, for me, a huge relief. I wouldn’t have to follow half a dozen steps behind Hawthorne for several weeks, desperately hoping he would find the solution so that I’d be able to finish the book. I wouldn’t get everything wrong like a real-life Watson or Hastings and nor would I get stabbed . . . as had happened on two occasions. All I would have to do was sit down with Hawthorne, listen to him set out the main beats of the story, examine any case notes he might have, maybe visit the crime scene to get the atmosphere and physical description, and then sit down quietly and write the whole thing in the comfort of my own home.

The timing could hardly be better. Eleventh Hour Films, the television production company run by wife, had just started developing Alex Rider for Amazon TV, but I’d decided not to write the scripts. There were two reasons for this. The first was that I was writing a new book, Nightshade. But I was also thinking of Stormbreaker, the feature film that had been made sixteen years earlier in 2003. The experience of working with a certain Harvey Weinstein, our American producer, had not been an altogether happy one and I thought it might be more sensible to let someone else have a crack of the whip. We’d found a great writer who was about twenty years younger than me: he’d bring his own vision to the character, and although I’d help shape some of the episodes, I would be free to focus on other things.

One of these was a new James Bond novel. Trigger Mortis had come out and had done well, and to my surprise, the Ian Fleming estate had offered me the chance to write a second. My first instinct had been to say no. Bond novels demanded an enormous amount of work: doing the research, getting the language right, avoiding the obvious pitfalls of bringing a 1950s character to life for a twenty-first-century audience with a whole new set of values. I wasn’t even sure I had a second story in me.

Then something had happened. A first line fell into my head. I have no idea where it came from. I sometimes think that all writers are like radio receivers, picking up signals from . . . who knows where? ‘So, 007 is dead.’ It was M talking. One of his agents had been killed, but it wasn’t Bond. This would be an origin story, predating Casino Royale, telling how Bond got his licence to kill, inherited the number and was sent on his first mission. I’m not saying it’s the most brilliant idea anyone’s ever had, but that’s how it works for me. I knew I had to write it.

I was thinking about setting it in the South of France. It would involve the CIA and the true scandal of American involvement with heroin traffickers back in the fifties. I already had some thoughts about the main villain, Jean-Paul Scipio. Fleming had a penchant for physical peculiarities, from Dr No’s contact lenses to Scaramanga’s third nipple. Scipio would be massively, unnaturally obese and that would also play a part in the way he died.

I wasn’t writing it yet, although I was thinking about it all the time. This meant my desk was clear and there might just be time to get Hilda off my back.