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book. Orla’s murder and John’s disappearance was on the front pages of nearly all of them except the
Financial Times
and the
Guardian
. The
Sun
’s headline brought a half-smileto my lips: HOUSTON, WE HAVE A PROBLEM. It’s not the half-naked girl on Page Three that sells that paper – not for many years; it’s the anonymous guys who write the headlines. As an anonymous writer myself I always had a soft spot for those guys.
    I bought a coffee from a Starbucks and carried it and the papers back to my flat where, after glancing quickly over the other articles, I finally read Mike Munns’s story. The purpose of lunch the previous day was now plain to me: Munns had needed some quotes to spice up his piece, which was every bit as hurtful as Peter Stakenborg had said it was – worse, if you were John Houston, Stakenborg or Philip French. I came out of it marginally better than they did. Oddly the thing that irritated me most was that Munns had attributed Somerset Maugham’s famous quote about Monte Carlo to me; it looked as if I’d tried to pass it off as my own, and since the subtext of the article was that I was the ‘Machiavellian’ mastermind behind a kind of grubby fraud in which a sweatshop of poorly paid, ruthlessly exploited authors wrote all of Houston’s books in order that he might pass them off as his own work, I saw myself portrayed as a sort of literary forger, like Thomas Chatterton or, more recently, Clifford Irving. It mattered not a bit to Munns or to the
Mail
that over the years, in the many interviews he conducted with the press – including the
Daily Mail
 – John had always been perfectly open about his modus operandi. And after all, what was so wrong with the idea of a writing factory? Hadn’t painters like Van Dyck and Rubens kept
ateliers
where other artists skilled in painting landscapes or children or animals were employed to fill in the blank spaces on some of those enormous canvases? And like Andy Warhol, didn’t Jeff Koons and Damien Hirst do something very similar to what Van Dyck and Rubens haddone? Why in the minds of critics – and the critics had been very critical of John Houston, the author – was it all right for a painter to rely on assistants but not all right for an author to do the same? Would
War and Peace
have been any less of a great novel if today it were to be revealed that Tolstoy had employed another writer to pen that account of the Battle of Borodino in exactly the same way that Eugène Delacroix employed Gustave Lassalle-Bordes to help him paint some of his larger murals? I doubted it very much.
    But then I would say that, wouldn’t I?
    I called Peter Stakenborg back and tried to reassure him the article wasn’t nearly as bad as he had imagined it was; he wasn’t convinced; so I called Mike Munns and left a one-word message on his cellphone that Samuel Beckett informs us was the trump card of young wives. Then I stood in front of my standing desk, switched on my computer and tried to forget the whole wretched affair.
    The thing is I feel more alert while I’m standing; when I’m sitting behind my other desk I am too easily distracted by the internet – the PC on the standing desk isn’t connected, so there’s no temptation to send an email, to pay a visit to YouTube or Twitter, or make a bet on the William Hill website. Writing is all about the elimination of distractions. I’m always amazed how some writers have music playing in the background. Like anything else, a standing desk takes a little bit of getting used to; you have to learn not to lock out your knees and to spread the weight between both legs; but there’s no doubt that I feel much more alert while I’m standing. Above my desk there’s a picture of Ernest Hemingway typing something while he’s standing up: the typewriter is balanced on top of a music case which is on top of a set of shelves, and so strictly speaking there’s no desk involved, but it alwaysreminds me that a good