The Tortured Artist

When I left home today I thought I was in for more badgering by my publisher. I’d been employed by Samson and Samson for three years, and made them lots of money with potboiler horror novels. My formula was simple: attractive young women are tortured and killed by serial killer/monster/zombies/curse, while a hero saves one, then sleeps with her. I had three pseudonyms, under which I’d written almost every disposable bestseller for semi-literate sadists.
 
But now I wanted to try something larger, more literary. I’d had an idea, a wonderful idea, for a slow-paced, emotional horror novel about the Catholic faith, into which I’d been born as a rural Irishman. My publisher, Gregory Samson, fifty-nine and fat with trash novel money, wasn’t impressed. He’d badgered me relentlessly for almost a month before today, trying to shatter my confidence, or make me “realise my niche”, as he put it.
 
People didn’t want emotions and “themes” (he used that word like a swear) from a James Richmond novel, he said. They wanted young girls staked and burned alive, with plenty of sex on the side. When I signed with Samson and Samson he’d even made me Anglicise my name. Before I was Patrick Hanrahan, now just James Richmond.
 
I sat in his waiting room, surrounded by framed pictures of authors he and his firm had made famous. I was up there too, behind his secretary, a middle-aged woman with piled hair and chained glasses. In my picture I wore a trench coat and held a cigarette beside my face, like a 1950s broadcaster.
 
On either side of me were novelists known for romance fiction, one a plastic monster in a wrinkled pink dress, the other a young man with salacious green eyes and small lips. Below our pictures were little typed lists of our five bestselling books. The secretary turned to me and said: “Mr Samson will see you now.”
 
“I’ve been coming here three years, Mary” I replied, “you can call him Gregory, and me James, for that matter. Hell, I’d even let you call me Jim.” She gave me a perfunctory smile. That isn’t how I was raised, I pictured her saying.
 
Gregory Samson didn’t acknowledge my presence until I’d sat down, placed my right ankle on my left knee, and waited five minutes as he examined various sheets of paper. He did this every time we met, and I still wasn’t sure whether it was sincere or some strange power play. Finally, he put down his papers and met my gaze. “Hello, James” he said, like a boss to a doomed minion. I was nervous now. “Hello, Gregory” I replied.
 
“I assume you still mean to write that book about Irish peasants.”
 
“Irish Catholics, and yes.” Gregory gave an affected sigh, his stomach threatening to pop his shirt buttons. “And there’s nothing I can do to change your mind? Give you a 4, even 5% raise on your next book, provided it’s a traditional Richmond, perhaps?”
 
“Nope, sorry.”
 
“I suppose I can’t even tempt you with women anymore. That was always a safe bet before feminism. Find the chap a nice little whore he could marry on a pre-nup. That’s how Michael met his wife, you know…” Michael Thomas was the green-eyed romantic whose picture hung beside mine.  
 
I smiled. Michael’s wife, I recalled, was a beautiful Korean half his age. Many years had passed since his picture in the waiting room was taken. He was now saggy-jowled and with eyes that shone more like winter grass than emeralds. On his arm his wife looked more like an adopted daughter than someone he presumably made love to. They’d appeared in a magazine under the headline “May/December”, which Winslow threw a fit over. “I’ll have you know I’m as virile as any of these Nancy boys you’ve got churning out the slop!” he’d reportedly screamed in the editorial room, the sweep of his arm taking in a roomful of hacks. “She’ll tell you! Won’t you, flower?” According to rumour Mrs Thomas cast her eyes down at this and said “Mr Thomas is a very generous man...”
 
“Sorry, Greg” I said, “I live in Soho. If I wanted a whore I’d pop down the road.”
 
It was then that Gregory Samson stood up, moving his bulk the way you’d carry loaded bags, walked to where I sat and leaned on the desk. Less than a foot separated us. “Well” he said, “if you really can’t be persuaded, then I’d better let you in on a little publishing secret. You see, James, publishing is a career, like horse-training, and what do you think happens when a horse grows lame?”
 
“Are you threatening to fire me, Greg?”
 
He laughed. “No, James, I’m threatening to shoot you!”
 
I laughed, though something in his tone unsettled me. “You think I’m joking” he said, still smiling, “well, maybe I am, but this is an office, and like any office, there’s disciplinary measures in place to discourage poor performance. For instance, that sister of yours, Rose. Fine young woman… She was there when you accepted that Edgar Allan Poe award, wasn’t she? Charming girl, and so innocent. God knows how she’d hold up under an assault, and there’s a lot of dangerous men about…”
 
I frowned, trying to inject that frown with menace. But his position above me, both literally and figuratively, drained my courage. “Okay, Greg, that’s enough.” He laughed and slapped my shoulder. “I’m only talking!” he said, “I doubt it’ll ever come to that, old man, and even if it does, we allow our best writers many measures. Who do you think got Harriet Winslow’s kid hooked on dope?”
 
Winslow was the plastic monster. Her son committed suicide five years ago. “Of course, that was the only measure we took. We had nothing to do with the poor kid’s death, or his taking to the harder stuff.”
 
I remembered Peter Winslow. A rakish young man in his early twenties, moaning that there weren’t enough girls at a literary event for his mother, attended by twinset-and-pearls types that still longed for men who wore breeches and weren’t afraid to slap a woman. I liked him because he was unpretentious and immature, a carefree youth I’d never had the chance to be myself. I recalled him later that evening talking to a stout moustachioed man carrying a doctor’s bag. The next time I saw Peter Winslow he seemed sad and uncertain. He was hanging around the publisher’s office when his mother saw him and looked as though a regal guest had found a dirty pair of knickers. ‘You shouldn’t be here, Peter’ she whispered, by instinct digging through her bag.
 
I felt sick. I thought for a moment that I’d vomit all over Gregory’s shoes, his shiny black shoes, which gleamed like oil on steel. I still told myself it was a joke, however. Gregory Samson was a complex man, a veteran of an entertainment family which knew all the in-jokes. The other Samson in the firm’s title was his late father. “What did Winslow do to offend you?” I asked, attempting a light manner.
 
“Oh, she wanted to write some crap about life in the Blitz. Factual thing, big downer. I told her, just like I always tell you, a writer needs to know his niche. If we published a book about some family selling groceries and hiding in a cellar for nine hundred pages, only to have their eldest son reported dead at the end, all the little Winslow fans around the UK would run a mile.
 
“They want handsome heroes, virginal heroines, and, most importantly, happy endings. Just like your readers want sex and gore. In the end she threatened to sign a contract with another publisher. I couldn’t allow that.”
 
He could tell I was getting ready to be sick and handed me a wastepaper basket. I took it, though I couldn’t even hurl a chunk, as it happened. “And what happens if I keep refusing to write what you want me to write, no matter what you do to me or my family?”
 
He sighed, seeming genuinely sad. The action made his tie flop like a dead man’s tongue. He opened one side of his jacket and revealed a dazzlingly bright revolver, in a holster attached to his shoulder strap. “We’d make it look like suicide, of course” he said, “suicide sells better than a sordid murder. Kids’ll hail you as an underground saint, their parents’ll call you a tortured artist, and everyone’ll buy your books for a glimpse of the tragic soul. Suicide confers dignity on an artist, James. Sylvia Plath’s publishers knew that…”
 
“Did they…”
 
“Oh no! Of course not. Didn’t need to. But it was good selling point anyway. This is the secret I mentioned earlier. Every publisher works this way, even moreso now, what with Kindles cutting their profits.” He opened a drawer in his desk and took out a stack of five books, all mine. “These are your bestsellers, James. Each one’s brought us, you and me, enough wealth to last a lifetime. All you have to do is make another one like these, and we need never have this conversation again.”
 
“Until I decide to write something I want to write.” Gregory merely smiled in response. “So, James Richmond, beloved author of Slut Stabber and The Screaming Witch, d’you have any ideas for your next masterpiece?”
 
And that’s how I came to write this, my new story (names and aspects changed, of course) which I’m presently typing on my publisher’s laptop. He loves the idea, seeing it as just another dumb horror story which no-one will think much about, and they won’t, and even if they do they’ll see it as ironic, or “meta”, a clever piece of satire, like those self-aware slasher films. He’s pleased he inspired my new “plot”, though he graciously refused an acknowledgement.
 
I’m in the process of enlarging his secretary’s breasts and halving her age. She’s now a college intern with unchained glasses and flowing hair. As I write she knocks on Samson’s door, while Samson stands beside it, wearing a mask, knife poised above him, ready to tear at her pale white flesh.