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a matter of hours. In fact I know he used to fly it quite regularly here to London.’
    ‘The boat is still in its berth in the Monte Carlo harbour. And the plane is still at the airfield. No, we believe Monsieur Houston must have left Monaco by road. A car has been taken from his garage.’
    ‘Which one?’
    ‘The Range Rover.’
    I smiled. Got that one right. ‘Okay. I’ll see you on Monday. Goodbye.’
    ‘Goodbye, monsieur.’
    Goodbye. Easy. I never quite bought that last line in Chandler’s
The Long Goodbye
: ‘I never saw any of them again – except the cops. No way has yet been invented to say goodbye to them.’ What does that mean? People give the cops the brush-off all the time; and if anyone was equal to the task of doing it for real it was surely John Houston; the man wasvery resourceful. Still, Chandler’s is a great title. One of the best I’d say. That and
The Big Sleep
. Sometimes a good title helps you to write the novel. I wasn’t at all happy with the title of my own novel. I wasn’t happy with the beginning. And I certainly wasn’t happy with the hero – he was too much like me: dull and pompous with a strong streak of pedantry. John was always picking me up for that when, earlier in our working relationship, he read a draft I’d written for one of his own books:
    ‘As usual you’ve made the hero much too professorial, Don. He’s a bit cold. Not likeable at all. You need to go back and make us like him more.’
    ‘I don’t know how to do that.’
    ‘Sure you do, old sport. Give him a pet dog. Better still let him find an abandoned kitten. Or have him call his mother up. That always works. Or maybe there’s a kid he knows who he gives a few bucks to now and then. People like that. Shows he’s got a heart.’
    ‘It’s a bit obvious isn’t it?’
    ‘This isn’t Nicholson Baker, Don. We don’t sweat the small stuff. We tell it how it is in broad strokes, and people can take it or leave it. I’m not much interested in the finer aspects of characterization any more than I am in winning the Man Booker Prize. We’re not writing for Howard Jacobson or Martin Amis.’
    ‘But he’s supposed to be a ruthless killer, John.’
    ‘That’s right.’
    I shrugged. ‘Which would imply a degree of unlikeability. Did people like the Jackal in Forsyth’s novel?’
    ‘I did,’ said John. ‘The Englishman, as Freddie more often calls him, is bold and audacious. Yes, he is cool and self-contained and a cold-blooded killer. But he also has style andconsiderable charm. Remember that French bird he shags when he’s on the run. When he’s with her he’s a bit like James Bond. Smooth and full of smiles. Charm will take a character a long way. Even when he’s also a bastard. Until I fix them your characters tend to lack charm, Don. A bit like you.’
    He chuckled at his little joke.
    ‘It’s there – the old army officer charm – but you keep it hidden, old sport. It’s buried deep along with a lot of other shit. Look, Don, if we’re going to spend three hundred pages with this guy we have to like him a bit. If you write a biography of Himmler you at least have to find him interesting, right? So, it’s the same with this guy in the novel. He has to be someone you might want to have a beer with. That’s the key to any successful character in fiction, Don. No matter who he is, no matter what he’s done, he has to be someone you might want to sit with in a bar. If it comes to that it’s also how you get elected to be the President of the United States, or the Prime Minister of Great Britain. For that to happen you have to look like someone to have a drink with.’
    ‘Right.’
    ‘Remember what we did with Jack Boardman?’
    Then there were only two, but Jack Boardman became the hero of six novels, of which the most recent was
The Second Archangel: A Jack Boardman Story
.
    ‘Yes, I think so.’
    ‘We based him on your best friend at Sandhurst. What was his name? Piers something