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Thirty Years Later

Broten’s Encyclopaedia of British Plants and Trees is the first book on my bookshelf, but you wouldn’t know what it was if you saw it. It’s cocooned in bubble wrap and the sort of UV-resistant plastic that keeps old Superman comics from falling apart in the sun.

The thirty-year-old rose inside is only slightly the worse for wear. One petal is gone, plucked from it by my scruffy-haired sixteen-year-old self. The idiot. He felt the need to carry that petal around and show it to girls at the sort of parties where they’re always playing The Cure. Eventually, of course, he gave it away to one of them as they sat in a locked park, late one summer night.

There are other, lesser, damages. A leaf folded and split accidentally here, a thorn come loose and picking at the book’s bindings there. With each exposure, these things build up. That’s why, nowadays, my mother’s rose stays firmly pressed between its pages, safe in the pitch-black care of etched hawthorns and hyacinths, swaddled in its bubble wrap and Superman’s special plastic.

The next book on my bookshelf – and this is assuming we’re travelling east, as all young readers here learn to do – the next book is a big hardback edition of my father’s Collected Works.

The inscription on the title page reads, ‘I’ll always be here for you, Tom’, and if you asked me to, I could reproduce every curl and line of that note from memory, even now. It’s a solid book with a lot of wear, pages thumbed, corners folded, passages underlined. A collector’s bookshop might describe it as ‘heavily used’, but if it were a teddy bear, you wouldn’t hesitate to call it ‘well loved’.

After the Collected Works, we come next to three books from my early teens. A handsome hardback of Don Quixote, a paperback of It, and a dog-eared copy of The Warlock of Firetop Mountain.

These books are survivors, remarkable because they still exist. At the age of thirteen, on one long-forgotten day in July, I took each one down from its shelf in our country home and put it into a suitcase (along with Collected Works and the encyclopaedia of plants and trees, which went everywhere with me) to take to my aunt’s place by the sea for summer holiday reading. Because of this, these books were not in our house when my father’s second wife, the poet Margery Martin, burned it down and destroyed everything else that we had.

Let’s move on.

After the survivors, there’s another book by my father, The New Collected Writing. This is a thin, black book, a line of soot and desolation dividing the shelf like the K–T boundary. Its inscription reads ‘To Thomas, my son’. Dr Stanley Quinn left room for more words to follow, but must’ve reconsidered, or never got around to adding them. The rest of the page is untouched. And marks an ending, this book, a scarred and blasted Maginot Line between me and my father. A line that neither of us would reach across for the many long years that followed.

The books continue along the shelf, more than a decade passing with them, until finally we arrive at The Qwerty Machinegun by Thomas Quinn, my own first novel. I posted this particular copy to my father on publication day, only to have it come back a week later with a curt note from someone I’d never met – ‘Too little, too late’, it said.

Too little, too late. The obituaries began to appear a few days later. My timing has always been lousy. My father – my talking, speaking, moving, breathing, hand-holding father – had come apart for good.

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Just beyond The Qwerty Machinegun, standing behind my own first novel like the Empire State Building stands behind that little church in New York, is another first novel – Cupid’s Engine.

This huge book sits at the absolute centre of my shelf like a great, dark keystone, every inch of its creased and battered cover plastered with praise: ‘The crime novel of the decade’, ‘An intricate puzzle-box of delights’, ‘addictive and astonishing’, ‘a feast for whodunit fans’, ‘flawless’, ‘remarkable’, and somewhere in amongst it all, ‘“A uniquely talented writer” –Stanley Quinn’. My father rarely supported other writer’s books in this way, but then, Cupid’s Engine is remarkable in at least half a dozen different ways. The book’s author, Andrew Black, barely gets a mention on this particular cover, but that hasn’t stopped the name looming large in the imaginations of the literary press and reading public in the nine long years since Cupid’s Engine first found print. ‘A mysterious and elusive mastermind’ says the quote from the Independent. And they would know. They, like everyone else, had been unable to land an interview, or even an author picture to run alongside their five-star review. No details about Andrew Black were available at the book’s publication; nobody talked to Black; nobody met Black, and that remains the case even to this day. Conspiracy theories, hoaxes, blurry author photos and doctored documents all did the rounds and were debunked and dismissed in turn. Black’s publishers offer nothing but coy smiles and upturned palms when questioned, knowing that that mystery does nothing to hurt book sales, and Black’s agent, Sophie Almonds, continues to issue the exact same statement, year on year, in response to any and all enquiries: ‘Andrew Black is not available for comment or interview, but he thanks you for your interest in his work.’

One of the few concrete details to be unearthed and verified by Black hunters concerned that unusual cover quote from my father. I hadn’t been the only one to find a quote from Stanley Quinn surprising, and pulling on that particular thread yielded results for those hungry for details on the mysterious author.

Andrew Black had been my father’s assistant and, later, his protégé.

Chosen one. Heir apparent. Disciple. Take your pick from the press clippings. I’d seen spiritual son a few times too, which stung just that little bit more than the others, as you can probably imagine. My father was immensely proud of Black, and Black – by several published accounts – idolised my father in return. They were a team, a unit, a literary family of two. My father never revealed a single additional detail about Black, no matter how often he found himself pressed, but he happily confirmed the basics. Assistant turned protégé. Proud.

And here’s the thing – my father was right to be proud of Black. And yes, it sometimes hurts my insides a little when I think about it, but what does that matter? He was right.

Cupid’s Engine became a global phenomenon, and continues to sell in huge numbers, year after year after year. And it should; it should. Andrew Black is a genius. The book is – there is no way to deny it – an out-and-out masterpiece.

This particular copy has been read almost to destruction: the spine is a mass of white fracture lines; its glue is cracked; and dozens of yellowing, dog-eared leaves poke out of it at odd angles. It’s an arresting object, a great, shabby monolith that’s so big, so dominant in fact, that you could easily miss the book behind it.

Tucked away on the far side of Cupid’s Engine, sitting so far back on the shelf as to half vanish into the shadows, is a second copy of my novel, The Qwerty Machinegun. This one’s damaged, its spine horribly buckled from a collision with something hard.

If you were to take this copy down from the shelf and open it, you’d discover that its pages were crammed almost to obliteration with changes, crossings-out, and hundreds and hundreds of neat, handwritten notes and corrections made with a fine black pen. Flipping to the front, to the title page, you’d find a small, equally neat inscription:

Thomas,

You asked me what I thought of your novel.

Andrew Black

____________

In English, the literary arrow of time travels to the right. This is our law of pages, lines, words and letters. Left is a past left behind, and right is an unknown future. Of course, you know this. You’re travelling along with that arrow at this very moment. But be careful, these words might appear to be rattling by like scenery glimpsed from a train window but – just like that scenery – nothing on this page is really moving at all.