Crooked Herring by L.C. Tyler

chip from my plate.
    ‘Henry’s a friend,’ I said. ‘Well, sort of.’
    ‘I’ve always found him an irritating shit. Take the way he dresses …’
    ‘I can’t see anything wrong with the way he dresses …’
    ‘He dresses exactly the way you do, Ethelred, but he’s thirty years younger.’
    ‘Twenty years younger.’
    Elsie shook her head. ‘That still doesn’t make it
right
, does it? You wear tweed jackets because you were made to wear them when you were in your pram, and nobody hasever explained to you that you are now permitted to go around in a sweatshirt and jeans. But for Henry they are a pure affectation. Then there’s all this business with blood sports and the countryside, when everyone knows he grew up in Putney or Pinner or somewhere. He’s a cheap replica of you, only six inches shorter.’
    That was possibly true. Hadn’t the assistant manager of the club said much the same thing?
    ‘You think he sees me as a role model?’ I asked.
    ‘I hope not – not if he wants to make a living out of writing. I just think it’s creepy.’
    ‘Thank you,’ I said.
    ‘My pleasure. Henry does resemble you in one other way, though – he wanted to write a great literary novel.’
    ‘Nothing wrong with that either.’
    ‘The difference though is that he did write one, rather than just talk about it. He apparently penned a brilliant crime novel of great literary distinction.’
    ‘Which one was that?’ I asked. I wasn’t being facetious. Henry had published his first crime novel only a few years before, but his output since then had been prolific. People admired his ability to churn out page-turning thrillers. But nobody had ever mentioned the word ‘literary’ before in the same sentence as the words Henry Holiday.
    ‘I don’t know the whole story,’ said Elsie. ‘Somebody mentioned it in the bar at a conference, the way you do. Apparently Henry spent about ten years working on his first novel. Then it got completely trashed by some critic or other.’
    ‘So it was published? I thought—’
    ‘No, it never saw the light of day. He showed themanuscript to this big-shot critic. The critic told him that his life’s work was rubbish, and so Henry destroyed it – burnt the paper, wiped the discs. The following morning he sat down and started to write the sort of garbage that makes him so much money now.’
    ‘So, if it’s destroyed how does anybody know it’s a great literary work?’
    ‘Because Henry says it was. It seems that God subsequently revealed unto Henry Holiday in a vision that the big-shot critic was actually a tosser who had no idea what he was talking about. The scales fell from his eyes. Henry’s tried a couple of times to rewrite it, but it’s gone for good – the plot and the characters are there but not the thing that made it the finest book of all time.’
    ‘Who told you all that? Henry?’
    ‘No. I think it was his editor or agent. Or maybe his publicist. At a conference at three o’clock in the morning these things blur a bit – you know that terrible hour when the bar has stopped serving drinks but you can’t quite face the task of asking Reception to remind you what your name is and which room number you are in. But the origin was Henry himself who’d told it to this publicist or maybe to a friend of hers or perhaps to her friend’s mother on a very similar occasion at a very similar event. He was weeping genuine tears into an empty glass – that much is certain – though you have to allow for a little picturesque exaggeration in these stories.’
    ‘That’s sad,’ I said.
    ‘In a way. Had the great literary novel been published, then he’d have been scraping a living, getting brilliant reviews and selling a few thousand copies. As it is, he’s onhis way to becoming the next Crispin Vynall. Not before time, since you say the first one has been murdered.’
    ‘I certainly didn’t say that. I think Crispin’s absence is only temporary. It’s just