�������������������
It’s me. Meet
you 6.30, usual
place.” That was
the un-erased
‘“Suzy.
message on her
answerphone.’ With these words, Hollamby,
the beleaguered detective hack, had opened
his new book. Beyond these words, he didn’t
feel that confident.
Crank, his therapist, had pressed him to a
chair and told him to renounce the bottle. At
40 this was tragic, too early by far to toss it
all away. “That’s too bad,” said Hollamby.
He gazed up through the sash, and through
the imperfection of Crank’s square panes,
where a pigeon flew by, then a bit of litter
floated up.
������������
“I’m not going anywhere near my desk,” he
said. That months-old paragraph was going
to have to sit there. Crank tried a different
tack. “The problem’s financial,” he said. “Or
rather not. You’re wealthy. The mortgage is
paid. There is,” he said, “no pressure.”
Hollamby laughed, knowing they’d been
this way before. “Somehow,” he said, “your
fees just never quite enter that equation,”
and here he almost got up for his coat. Crank
told him not to be hasty and picked up the
phone to his wife, who managed his practice
and occupied the office next door. “Libby,”
he said, “you wouldn’t like to bring us both
some coffee … ”
Hollamby relaxed and rubbed his chin. He
thought of his own Peter Blane, the invented,
hard-boiled private eye of his 19 bestsellers.
Crank took out a pen, but immediately placed
it on his blotter, apparently at a loss. “It’s
writer’s block,” he said. “And it will pass.”
“No,” said Hollamby. “The problem’s this
- this what-you-call-it life - I mean the flab
of it.” Blane had always been his crusader,
a sceptical man with a defender’s sword,
a siren voice among the shallow tones of
a thrusting middle-class. 20 years ago the
graduate Hollamby had penned political
sonnets in a casebook, and attributed
them to Blane. “Unpolished, of course, but
always a blast at class hypocrisy. By book 12
Blane was bored,” he said. “In book 14 he
moved out of town.” Now, for 20, he’d got
a girl of all things - Suzy. “Worse, there’s a
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