Alex Marwood
“I think we all imagine it’ll be a life of martinis at the Algonquin,” says Al (he doesn’t want me to use his real name, a surprisingly common trait among the writers in this piece) of his first book deal. “Maybe it was naïve to write a book that referenced a number of London’s better-known gangsters, if that was the lifestyle I was aiming at. Or to throw a launch that was open to the public. Several of the gangsters turned up to that. Drank all the booze, and helped themselves to several copies. Did I ask them if they wouldn’t, perhaps, mind paying for them? I did not. Sometimes you gotta let those ‘gratis’ copies go…”
There’s a general consensus among writers that the promotional process is less about selling books than it is about reminding one not to get conceited. To be fair, you have to have a pretty robust ego to write more than one book, so promotion probably is some sort of karmic vengeance for all the times we’ve neglected our families’ trouble in favour of the imaginary dramas of our imaginary friends. We all have a picture in our heads, as we write our first novel, of how charming and yet modest we will be as the throngs of fans queue to tell us how they will treasure our signature forever. An afternoon spent following the David Beckham through the bookshops of Manchester, being offered a pile of his picture-heavy books to sign a handful of your own will soon disabuse you of that.
Writers, when we get together, love to compete over who’s experienced the greatest humiliations when they’ve gone out in public. Our gin-and-weeping sessions ring with tales of echoing bookstores, of the chain in the UK that seems specialises in inviting writers to do events and failing to have any of their books in stock (there’s an oft-repeated story of the novelist Jim Crace, on announcing that he had arrived to do an event, receiving the response “I think you’ll find that’s pronounced Cray-chi”), of co-panellists who exude resentment, of mile-long signing queues for other people.
Alphabetical determinism means that, at any large event, I will likely be signing next to Laura Lippman in the States, or Val McDermid in the UK, so I’ve become inured to this humbling experience. My game-face is immaculate as I sit out the statutory fifteen minutes that honour requires, while the occasional trainspotter asks me to sign the catalogue. Or, as happened to another friend, their bus ticket. At least I don’t generally have to pose for selfies, as happened to the great British polemicist, Julie Burchill, as she failed to shift a single copy at the Latitude Festival one year. “Brett Easton Ellis had a queue a mile long,” she says, “but no one wanted my books. In the end, I started GIVING the ruddy things away to save carting them back.”
Which pales by comparison with the bookshop that, having invited crime writer Karen E Olsen to speak on the grounds that she was “big enough” and “knew enough people” to bring in a crowd, then requested that she buy up their entire unsold stock of her books. Or the time Chris Manby, a big name in British Chick Lit, arrived at a bookshop to be greeted with great disappointment by the manager. “Oh,” he said. “We thought you were a bloke”. “That was also the event where someone came up to me and told me that they loved my books, but would wait ‘til this one turned up in the charity shop,” she says. “The night was saved by my sister and brother-in-law, who took me out to Nando’s.”
When I got to take my first American tour – a huge privilege, and God knows, despite the tales of woe, I’m grateful to have had the opportunity – I put out a call on Facebook for advice on how to do ten cities in eleven days and not actually die. The advice was much and varied. “Buy cheap knickers from Primark, and simply throw them away as you go. There’s nothing more dispiriting than a suitcase full of dirty underwear.” “The only thing edible on any American airline is those tapas boxes.” “Do not trust hotel conditioner.” “Eat every piece of fruit you come across. Otherwise the only vegetable matter you will consume will be Caesar salad.” “Go out of your hotel room and eat at least one meal a day in public, or you’ll turn feral.” “Suitcase whisky,” said a friend who’d returned from a dispiritingly empty event, Jonesing for a compensatory cocktail, only to realise that she was in Utah.
And then there was this, from a household name, who would kill me if I were to let you know who she was. Suffice to say that she had considerable skill in this area. “Make sure,” she said, “that you schedule an hour a day in which to be alone and cry.”
Ah, how I scoffed. I never knew she was so delicate, I thought. That’ll never happen to me! And then I found myself in an empty store in San Antonio, Texas, as the manager told me repeatedly how they’d had a three-legged dog that had “written” his autobiography in the previous week. “We had lines all round the block for that,” she said, as she eyed the ranks of empty chairs, the slowly-warming wine bottles and my drooping shoulders. “All round the block,” she added, just in case I’d missed the point.
That was the day when, instead of the canal boat ride and jolly dinner I’d been planning, I went in search of a liquor store to equip myself with the bottle of suitcase whisky that accompanies me everywhere I go, these days. I try not to cry as I drink, but sometimes it’s inevitable.
And then, there was the time when I found myself sitting at a small round bistro table, my books piled around me like battlements, in the middle of the land-side concourse at Stansted, London’s Third (or fourth, depending on your prejudices) airport. Demonstrating the Silver Lining theory of life, the fall of the Twin Towers saved younger writers from this particular ordeal, but many veterans remember going through it, the theory being that, as a lot of people buy books at airports, they would be gagging for a signed copy as they dragged their suitcase toward check-in.
It was a very small table, and someone had put a forlorn carnation, as scarlet as my cheeks, in a bud vase in the centre. Surreptitiously, I shifted it to the front of the table, to leave room for the frenzied signing to come, plastered on a modest-yet-welcoming smile, and waited. People stared at me gloomily from their thirty-deep queues, and went straight from desk to departures, in search of coffee and oblivion.
After ten minutes or so, a woman approached. “Can you tell me where the toilet is?” she asked. I pointed her in the direction indicated by the sign above her head. A few minutes later, someone asked me where the Easyjet desk was. Another said she was looking for JetBlue.
I picked a couple of books from the battlement and propped them up on the table in front of me. An angry man stopped, glared at it, glared at me.
“Hello,” I said.
“Do they sell these in Sheffield?” he asked.
“Yes,” I replied. “But I can sign one for you here. Maybe it would make a nice gift.”
“Hunh,” he said. “I’ll have a look and see if they sell them in Sheffield, and if they do, I might buy one there.
He stalked away. Another woman approached. My heart surged slightly as she picked a book up as she asked for the restrooms. She examined the cover, read the blurb (it was a particularly egregious cover, to be fair; it was the era when every novel written by a woman was emblazoned with a shrugging twentysomething, a handbag, or, if you were really lucky, both), and, with a pitying look, put it down and walked away.
You never really know where the humbling moment will come from. The feminist writer Rose Collis once found herself explaining that she didn’t know how much her book weighed. Crime writer Michael Wood beamed with pleasure when a man told him that he loved all his books, only to discover that he meant an entirely other Michael Wood. Historian and thriller writer Jane Robins, meanwhile, was asked “loudly, at a signing table what made me think I was qualified to write my book about Caroline of Brunswick. I suppose at least he bought a copy,” she sighs. “So that was something.”
Of course, this force-humbling doesn’t work on everyone.
There’s a writer – we’ll call him Tony, which might or might not be his name – who is celebrated among British novelists for the interviews he gives every time he has a book out, in which he disses every other writer on the planet, and boasts about how he’s going to “reinvent” whichever genre he’s adopted this year (he changes genre frequently, so obviously he little time to acquaint himself with other practitioners’ work). Having written in more than one genre myself, I’ve seen him about the circuit now and again, but we’d never actually spoken until the day we went to Sweden.
For a crime writer, being counted as worthy of attention in Sweden is as exciting as a residency at Bellagio for the literary set. Sweden is noir central. It’s our paradise, our source. It’s the country responsible for The Bridge, goddamnit. I was cock-a-hoop to be going, not just there, but to a genre-dedicated festival in a lovely medieval town, where the crowds were generous and enthusiastic and the entertainment was constant. It was the edge of the Baltic at the height of the Perseid meteor shower, and there were going to be writers there whom I really liked and rated. Nothing could possibly go wrong.
Right.
There was a huge, noisy “gala opening” on the first night, and, being rather bad at following instructions, I managed to come in through the exit, and found myself lost in a massive crowd of strangers, all talking at the tops of their voices in a foreign language. And though they seemed like friendly, smiling strangers, my Swedish doesn’t extend much beyond “Saga Norén, Länskrim, Malmö”, so it was all a bit daunting.
I spotted a writer in our group (we’ll call her Marian) in conversation with a man whose back was turned, and beetled toward her, relieved. And it was only once I’d kissed her and turned to him that I realised that her companion was Tony.
Now, as all women know, there’s a type of man who believes that any woman who engages him in conversation is in hot pursuit of his ageing, stoop-shouldered Dad-bod. Tony is one of those. And as he looked me up and down, I saw that a fat middle-aged superfan was clearly not what he himself was seeking.
“Hello!” I said. Offered my hand. Tony stared at it as though it were smeared in faeces.
“This is Alex Marwood,” said Marian. He looked unimpressed.
“I think I came in through the wrong door,” I said. “Where did you get your name badges?”
Tony turned his shoulder and resumed his conversation with Marian as though I had never spoken. Another Brit writer appeared, and then our publicist, a badge was procured, an organiser came and joined us, and we did the whole “how was your flight” thing, and I could see Tony’s shoulders stiffen as he realised I hadn’t taken the hint. That I wasn’t going to go away because oh my God she’s not just a fat middle-aged superfan she’s clearly a stalker. He started throwing micro-gesticulations with his eyes and his jaw at his publicist, who looked back at him, confused. I started to get the giggles.
The organiser stepped up on the stage, before her audience of 500. Spoke in Swedish, and then translated, for our sake, into English. The foreign writers! Let’s bring them up on stage and give them a big hand!
The crowd parted. Our relevant publicists ushered us to the stage steps. Tony glanced over his shoulder, saw me, gave me a sharp and urgent headshake.
Marian and the others started up the steps. Tony fell in behind. I made to follow.
Tony stopped short, turned to face me and showed me his palm like Gandalf seeing off the Balrog. The crowd, confused, fell quiet as they watched.
“No!” cried Tony. “Not you! This is for the writers! Only for the writers!”
I did succeed in selling a book at Stansted airport. After two hours of directing people to the toilet, a strapping man in Khakis strolled off the tube, manly canvas rucksack dangling casually from his shoulder. Our war correspondent (I still worked for a newspaper, back then), off to some hellhole to be bombed and strafed. He strode over to my table. “What are you doing here?” he asked.
“I’m signing books.”
“Cool!” he replied. Picked one up, studied the shrugging girl on the jacket, his face betraying not a trace of dismay. He whipped out his wallet.
“Fantastic!” he said, nobly, handing over his tenner. “Just what I need for my down time. I loved your last one.”
And he planted a stubbly kiss on my cheek and strode off toward departures, wielding my hideous book like a shield.
I’ve never seen him since. Wars move on, I jumped over the wall from the paper into book world, the internet killed that newspaper shortly after and I changed my name and started killing people for a living. But I’ll always love him for the day he saved my pride. And wonder what the Taliban make of that shrugging girl, in their caves in the heights of Helmand.