Corduroy Mansions

32. The Yeti Writes

‘Well, it’s what you might call a biographical thriller,’ said Barbara Ragg. ‘It’s a new category. But it’s going to be big. As big as The Da Vinci Code was. Ever since The Da Vinci Code was so successful, publishers have been looking out for something that will do the same thing. Code books. The uncovering of secrets. Masons. Rosicrucians. And so on.’

‘No accounting for taste,’ said Oedipus Snark.

‘You read The Da Vinci Code?’

He shook his head. ‘Far too busy,’ he said, and then added, ‘constituency business, you see.’

Barbara Ragg broke off a piece of her bread roll and buttered it carefully. ‘I’m not saying that it was great literature. But it kept enough people riveted. And from our point of view as agents - not that we were the agents in question - it did the trick. It made millions of pounds. Millions. Even for the agents.’

‘I can understand why you’re looking for the next thing,’ said Oedipus Snark. Millions of pounds: what would I do with millions of pounds? he wondered. Well, I wouldn’t be here. I wouldn’t be here in the Mermaid Inn in Rye talking to poor old Barbara Ragg. Paris perhaps. An agreeable little pied-à-terre on the Île de la Cité, perhaps, or near the Parc Monceau. Or an apartment in Manhattan, upper seventies, perhaps, East Side. Friends to match. Live in London, of course, but hop over to New York once a month for a few days. See what’s on at the Met. Take a few friends. Perfect.

‘Of course,’ said Barbara, ‘you can’t repeat things. Lightning doesn’t strike twice in the same place. So all those “me too” manuscripts that followed the Code ended up doing pretty miserably.’

She was warming to her theme. ‘And the same goes for authors. Some of them have one book in them - just one - and they’re never going to be able to write anything else.’

‘Like God,’ said Oedipus.

She looked at him quizzically.

‘He wrote the Bible, didn’t he? But he never really followed up with anything quite so successful.’

‘I was being serious.’

He smiled. ‘So was I. But tell me about this author of yours. I’m intrigued.’

Barbara buttered the rest of her bread roll. ‘He’s a first-time author,’ she said. ‘He came to us out of the blue. We get all sorts of manuscripts sent to us. The vast majority are impossible, of course, but every so often you get something really good. It’s like mining diamonds. You go through thousands of tons of kimberlite for one little diamond. And every so often, among millions of tons of the stuff, along comes a great big stone that gets De Beers jumping up and down with excitement. Well, that’s what it’s like with manuscripts. One beautiful idea among the tons of dross.’

Oedipus Snark had left his roll untouched. Although he was trying not to show it, he was fascinated by what Barbara was saying. This was the sort of thing that he liked: better - surer - than looking for the next high performers on the alternative stock markets. You could waste months of your time doing that and at the end of the day find that you simply could not compete with the young men in the City, with their access to whispers and rumours.

‘Go on,’ he said evenly. ‘This person from out of the blue.’

‘It landed on my desk,’ said Barbara. ‘We have somebody who gives things a preliminary read. She sends most of the stuff right back, or at least sends it back after we’ve let it sit in the office for three weeks or so. One wouldn’t want the authors to think that we’d rejected them out of hand.’

Oedipus raised an eyebrow. ‘So she said it had the makings?’

‘She did. In fact, she said that this was the one. I remember her precise words. “We must write to him and say thank you.” That’s what she said. Do you realise how rarely that happens in publishing? The last author who got anything like that was Wilbur Smith - you know, the man who writes about deeds of derring-do in Africa. Elephants and ancient treasure. Very exciting stuff. People love reading him. Sells millions. When he sent his first manuscript off to the publishers he was a complete unknown. He parcelled it up and sent it off - this was still the days of typewriters, of course, and it was maybe the only copy. Back came a telegram in no time at all: “Thank you for this wonderful book. Letter follows.”’

‘Nice,’ said Oedipus Snark.

Barbara agreed. ‘Most of the time, when an author writes to an agent or a publisher to find out about the fate of a manuscript, he gets a reply saying, “Your manuscript is under active consideration.” You know what that means, Oedipus? It means: we’re actively looking for it.’

Oedipus said nothing. It was a useful phrase, and he would have to use it himself in his own letters. ‘The point you raised with me is under active consideration.’ It was very nice.

Barbara continued her story. ‘Well, I took this manuscript home with me. I didn’t look forward to reading it, I’m afraid - I hate reading manuscripts but I had to do it. So I made myself a stiff gin and tonic and sat down with this great pile of paper. I hadn’t even read the title at that stage. All I had seen was the name of the author. Errol Greatorex. Not a good start. Names are important in the book business, you know. You can have one author called Stan Jones, or whatever, who writes exactly the same sort of book as, shall we say, somebody called Jodi de Balzac. Whose book makes its mark? Not Stan Jones’s, I’m afraid. So we had a bit of a problem with Errol Greatorex. It was the Errol, of course - the Greatorex bit was fine. Full of literary possibilities.

‘I sat down with my gin and Mr Greatorex’s manuscript and looked at the title. The Autobiography of a Yeti.’

Oedipus Snark’s eyes widened. ‘The Abominable Snowman?’

‘The very same. The yeti who lives up in the high forests of the Himalayas. On the edge of the treeline. That yeti.’

It was at this point that the waiter returned with the scallops. But neither of the diners paid much attention to the plate of elegantly served seafood that was placed before them. Barbara’s eyes were bright with the memory of the moment when she first began to read the manuscript. And Oedipus, for his part, was thinking: what if I took over this amazing story? What if I was the one to reveal this to the world? Me. Oedipus Snark. And something else crossed his mind too. Money.