Read Online Crime Writers and Other Animals by Simon Brett - Free Book Online Page B

phone number from a literary editor who gave him occasional reviewing work. She answered the phone with the brusqueness of someone who jealously guards her privacy, but when Carlton Rutherford announced his mission, her manner changed.
    Yes, she would be delighted to tell him anything he wanted to know. No fate was bad enough for that bastard Bartlett Mears.
    Mariana Lestrange lived in Hampstead. Of course she did. Bartlett Mears still lived in Hampstead, come to that. So did the majority of the glamorous literati with whom he had had affairs before, during and after his second marriage. The supply of them in Hampstead was so constant, he’d rarely felt the need to look elsewhere.
    She received the biographer in her imposing sitting room. One of its walls was shelved with British and overseas editions of her novels; another with international awards and citations.
    â€˜So,’ Mariana Lestrange purred in her famously sexy voice, ‘you want all the real dirt on Bartlett Mears . . .?’
    She must have been nearly sixty, but was still very beautiful. Tall, slender, with a surprisingly ample bosom, she wore her artfully blonded hair as a frame to the small face whose nose would have been too large on someone less striking.
    Carlton Rutherford felt a little uneasy in her presence. He always reacted that way to women of obvious sexual attraction. The state of his virginity remained precisely as it had been in 1959.
    â€˜Yes,’ he said nervously. ‘Anything you’re prepared to tell me. Obviously, I know all the stuff that’s been in the papers, but, er, anything more intimate would be . . . very welcome . . .’
    â€˜Hm. Who’s publishing your book?’ she asked sharply.
    â€˜Well, er . . . The thing is, that’s not quite decided yet . . .’
    â€˜Ah, I see. You mean it’s going to be auctioned.’
    Carlton Rutherford did not disabuse her of this error. For a writer of Mariana Lestrange’s stature, auctions would be a regular occurrence. She knew nothing of the end of the market where publishers don’t fight over books, but have to be cajoled into accepting them, and even then frequently don’t.
    â€˜Well, where shall we start . . .?’ Mariana purred on. ‘Impotence the first night I agreed to make love to him . . .? Or Bartlett peeing over the bed in our honeymoon suite . . .? Or the time he hit me so hard he broke my jaw . . .?’
    â€˜Oh, any of those. All of those. It all sounds wonderful!’ Carlton Rutherford responded gleefully. ‘Fire away!’
    So Mariana Lestrange fired away. She produced a savage catalogue of meanness, drunkenness, sexual malpractice, infidelity, theft and cringing deceit. She enumerated her former husband’s disgusting personal habits – his practice of stubbing out cigarette butts in coffee cups, his self-pitying hypochondria, his pill-gulping, his nose-picking, his farting, his belching, his snoring, his halitosis and the revolting state in which he left his underwear.
    The resentment born of five years’ cohabitation seemed not to have mellowed one iota with the passage of time. Only the tiniest of prompts was required to bring it once again bubbling to the surface.
    Carlton Rutherford’s pen could hardly move quickly enough across the page to record this cataract of domestic villainies. With each new revelation he hugged himself, gleefully envisaging where it could be inserted into his narrative.
    Dashiel Loukes had been right. This was the secret ingredient that the biography needed. There is nothing like total character assassination to send a book rocketing up the bestseller lists.
    At times Mariana Lestrange’s account sounded so vicious, the antics she described so evil, that Carlton Rutherford almost suspected her novelist’s instinct was fictionalizing for his benefit, but if ever he asked a hesitant ‘Did he
really
do that?’, she snapped back, ‘Of course! I