71-73 CHARING CROSS ROAD
Dear Mr Jakubowski,
I feel compelled to write to let you know how much I enjoyed that book you selected for me. I didn’t know that one could possibly laugh so much at the spectacle of someone else’s pain, but the sequence where the hood was attacked by the dog, and his later flight with its head still attached to his arm and the ensuing gangrenous folly was just too much. Hilarious.
I look forward to your next recommendation.
Yours sincerely,
Katherine Macher
* * * *
Dear Ms Macher,
I hope you enjoy the enclosed. Another dark story of dogs but this time taking place in a hellish version of New York, rather than the semi-comic sleaze of Miami (which I actually visited recently on the occasion of a book fair).
It’s a well-known fact that I’m no great animal lover, but I assure you that dogs are not at the top of my hit-parade of least lovable pets. Cats are. But sadly, cats in crime fiction are always endearing, cuddly and engagingly cosy. Maybe one day I should write a tale where unwelcome members of the feline species come to all sorts of grim and deadly exits.
Enjoy.
Best regards,
Maxim Jakubowski
* * * *
Dear Mr Jakubowski,
You’ve hit the right nerve or funny bone again. I didn’t realize there were so many uses for a dead dog!
I’m no cat lover either. Once, when I must have been seven or eight and temporarily living with my aunt, I developed a strong antipathy to her cat (I don’t recall its name all these years later - why must pets always be given names, stupid ones at that? An absurd habit), and one evening fiendishly poured some turpentine into its milk bowl (I used to spend many of my leisure hours painting by numbers and was given a small bottle of turpentine to clean my brushes). Naturally, the next morning the cat was found belly up in the garden. My aunt, who lavished all her affection on the horrible thing, became madly emotional but I never came under suspicion. Thus, you might say, began my career in crime . . .
Yes, you should write a story where cats come to all sorts of horrible ends. It would be fun. I’d heard you wrote in addition to owning the bookshop, but have never read anything of yours. Do send me something. I’d love to read what another sworn enemy of the animal kingdom might conjure up.
Yours,
Katherine Macher
* * * *
Dear Katherine,
Thanks for your letter.
It’s been a long time since I’ve written any fiction I’m really satisfied with. And, fortunately, past mistakes are now out of print, so I shall have to disappoint you. Also, most of my past work has not been in the crime and mystery field. Mostly fantasy, doomed tales of love and death in other dimensions or imaginary worlds that were too often rather close for comfort and reminiscent of the all-too-realistic world that surrounds us, or rather me. All very self-centred, I must say in retrospect.
I do a lot of non-fiction, though. Writing on film, rock music and of course crime. Here’s a remaindered copy of a recent critical effort, which won a prize in Canada of all places. It should be useful. Not all the books mentioned in it are still available, but do let me know if any sound interesting to you, and we can try and provide you with them.
Best regards,
Maxim Jakubowski
* * * *
Dear Maxim,
I was shopping in Bellevue the other day (it’s on the other side of the lake from Seattle; they have some good shopping malls there) and was browsing through this large bookstore full of old and used books. Somehow I’d remembered you telling me you had written fantasy. Lo and behold, on the first shelf I look at, there you were. A paperback copy of Beyond Lands of Never!
Your story touched me in strange ways.
Tell me about yourself, about London.
Yours,
Katherine
* * * *
Dear Katherine,
What is there to say? I’m a book junkie through and through, I live surrounded by books both at the shop and home. They mean so much to me, and I collect madly, even when there is no longer space on my shelves and floors. There’s no logic to it, even though I sadly know that I shall never get around to reading even a quarter of the books I hoard.
London is London.
The Charing Cross Road is a bookworm’s paradise still, though some of the smaller, quainter bookstores have long moved on because of costs. I’m lucky these particular premises became available. Outside, it’s spring already and the weather and the women outside are in bloom, which puts joy in my heart, but tramps who reek of drink and piss at night on the doorstep darken the view. It’s like another world, hidden behind the facade of the books, one where life and the recession act out their depressing charade, and so many people are out of work and pester you for money for booze, and gypsy women with round-faced children on the underground beg or pretend to be refugees from Bosnia, and pitiful buskers strum out-of-tune guitars and nasally serenade crowds with chainsaw massacre versions of ‘Norwegian Wood’. Sometimes, I wonder.
I’ve asked Thalia in mail order to send you those John Dickson Carr locked room novels you’d enquired about some time ago. They’ve now come back into stock.
What about you?
Regards,
Maxim
* * * *
Dear Maxim,
London sure sounds interesting. Like all nice places, it has I see a dark side. Here, we have Capitol Hill, once bohemian and flowery, now grunge capital of the world, with men and women looking pale and miserable and proud to be ugly. It’s the young men in their silly shorts and unattractive hairy legs even in the deep of winter who get to me. I can take the hair, the greyness of their clothes, but it’s the legs, I can’t help from giggling.
There certainly is a weird fascination about locked room mysteries. Surely lessons in how to commit the perfect murder and get away with it. Though some of Carr’s plots are fiendishly complicated and unwieldy, to say the least.
Last weekend I went to visit friends who live three hours south in Portland, Oregon. I’d been to State University there with Lisa, we even shared an apartment for two years; now she’s married to this French photographer who she swears is cheating on her. Jean-Paul had to go on some fashion assignment on Sunday morning, so Lisa suggested we go to this nude beach in the Willamette Valley. I was somewhat taken aback, it’s something I’d never thought about doing ever before. But I was reminded of that character in that short story of yours who dreams of topless women on foreign beaches and the thousands of breasts on display in all shapes and sizes. So I said yes, why not? It was a weird experience, but pleasurable. There weren’t that many people around. The beach was down in a deep canyon and the river level was very low. At first I felt self-conscious and remained topless, but close by there was a family with some young kids and it all looked so natural, so after an hour or so, I took my bottom off. A day to remember.
You’re to blame, of course.
I want to know more about your London.
Love,
Kate
* * * *
Dear Kate,
I feel pleased and confused that you’re telling me so much of yourself.
Yes, I can imagine you on the nude beach, with green hills and mountains surrounding the river bed canyon. I close my eyes and turn to crime. A criminal voyeur of the imagination. I try to conjure up the image of your hair in the wind (long? Dark auburn shades?), the shape of your body, the curve of your breasts, the roundness of your buttocks. Yes, you must have looked quite beautiful and I accept the blame, all responsibility. It would have been nice to have been there, but then again I’ve been putting on weight these last years, and the spectacle might not have been as edifying, I fear . . .
London?
It’s really unlike any other city. More like a collection of most diverse villages scattered together, with various focal points, the City for business, the West End for shopping and entertainment, Soho for food and now much neutered vice, parks and gardens galore, not many skyscrapers like American cities, all low-key, neutral, like a curtain that conceals shadowy truths. People often think of London as foggy, Dickensian, old. Not any more. It’s a city with octopus-like extensions in all green directions, suburban, dull, exotic, safe, sordid, but for me still full of secrets.
And when the sun comes out the women are in bloom like nowhere else. Objects of fantasy, bodies of reality, voices, flesh.
I could imagine you here, you know.
But enough of my digressions . . .
I hope I haven’t shocked you. Sometimes words escape and trap me. But it’s better to be honest about it, I suppose. I get carried away on the waves of writing, letters, words take on a life of their own, move from brain to typewriter with too much ease. This is how I betray myself.
Kind regards,
Maxim
* * * *
Dear Maxim,
No, you didn’t shock me. Perhaps in a way I was secretly hoping you would be so direct. I understand. Really. Honesty can have its own rewards.
Listen. Or whatever one does when reading. I told you about my girlfriend Lisa, the one I went nude sunbathing with in Portland. You remember? Well, I’d told her that I was having this correspondence with you, that you wrote really sweet letters, so I suppose she remembered your name. So, the other morning, the post is dumped on the outside porch and I open the door and there was this thick envelope there. She’d found this book of yours for a few cents at Goodwill (it’s a giant thrift warehouse, where you can find all sorts of crazy things), it’s one you’d never told me about. She’d read it and said it was absolutely weird and disgusting, that I had to see it for myself.
Gee, my mind is still in a whirl. I’d never come across something that made me so randy before. Lisa says it’s the bit about the cystitis and pissing all blue that grossed her out, but I didn’t mind so much; well, it’s sometimes a fact of-life, isn’t it, even if it’s somewhat unpalatable? What got to me, though, was the bit about the ice. I’d never heard about anything like that before, for sure. I’ve got a healthy fascination and interest in all things sexual, well I’ve read a lot, put it that way, but wow! the ice sure freaked me out. And made me feel all funny. I’m horribly fascinated. Whenever I’m in the kitchen, I give the refrigerator strange looks, you know. In a perverse way, it’s something I’d like to try just to judge what must be a curious mixture of pleasure and pain, but I’m sure it would be better with another, rather than alone, talk about solitary pleasures!
Did it ever happen to you, or as with all things bizarre did you read about it in a book and put it in your story?
I realize this correspondence is moving in strange directions. Forgive me.
Eager and curious for more.
Affectionately,
Kate
* * * *
Dear Kate,
Well, Rites of Seduction is not a story I advertise too widely. You can understand why, can’t you?
Sometimes I write things that I know are going to shock, even repulse people but I can’t help it. It’s part of me. You have a story you wish to tell, emotions you want to put across, feelings that call for a scream rather than a whisper, and it pours out because it’s the thing to do, the way it is.
I write this, thinking of you in distant Seattle, half a world apart, excited in a million familiar ways because I realize I’ve established some form of connection with you, and I don’t know where it’s taking me.
All around, London is switching the sun off as summer nears its natural end, stronger grey winds building up, drizzly shards of rain cooling the temperature so that all the pretty unattainable women no longer display generous acres of flesh, bare backs, tan lines like necklaces above their shoulders, nipples almost bursting through their thin T-shirts, legs with no end peering out from the shortest of skirts or dresses. Enough. I obsess too easily. Control.
Imagine the newspaper headline:
LONDON BOOKSELLER GOES ON SEX CRIME SPREE
The owner of a specialist bookshop on London’s Charing Cross Road was arrested today after making passes at every woman under the age of sixty that entered his shop. He says ‘I just couldn’t help it. They were all too pretty.’
You wouldn’t forgive me, would you, Kate?
Confused,
Maxim
P.S. A waste of a letter really, this. Maybe you should ignore it altogether. I seem to have rambled on in a most silly fashion.
* * * *
Dear Maxim,
Maybe you should come to Seattle. After all, the World Mystery Convention is taking place here next year. Should you need an excuse? I want to meet you, and no, I don’t know what will happen when we meet. I feel I know you so well already. Something about you scares me a little, but I’m ready, more than I will ever be. Yes, I too invent newspaper stories:
MAD SEATTLE WOMAN SLAYS BRITISH AUTHOR
A Kirkland librarian who had been corresponding for some time with a British author was discovered yesterday by a neighbour in a catatonic state. The body of English bookseller and writer Maxim Jakubowski, 48, was found in her bedroom. He had been sexually mutilated.
Katherine Macher, 28, when interrogated later, after recovering from her state of shock, confessed ‘his sexual demands were too bizarre’.
A Seattle Times reporter later contacted mystery critic Marvin Lachman about the deceased, ‘His crime stories were so violent they were like the literary equivalent of a snuff movie’.
Seriously, though, it’d be great if you could visit (I’d defrost the fridge beforehand to avoid temptation!).
Some time back, you recommended James Crumley to me, but I never did get around to him. Here’s a cutting (a real one) from our local paper; he’s reading at the Elliott Bay Bookshop next month. Do you know Crumley personally?
Yours,
Kate
* * * *
Dear Kate,
Yes, I did meet Crumley some years back at a crime festival in the French Alps. He’s a terrific guy, drinks mightily, a bit like a Hemingway of the crime world. A rather frantic life, so The Mexican Tree Duck is his first novel in a decade. A genuine event. You must attend the reading, and if you have the opportunity give Jim my best regards.
Sexually mutilated? Tell me more. Morbid, moi? Not at all. Well, in London we’re used to that sort of thing, you know. After all, Jack the Ripper, shrouded in his Dickensian fog, was the first modern serial killer of note. In the shop, we also sell a lot of true crime books, not by personal choice I assure you, but there are bills to pay. The interesting thing is that so many of the more gruesome volumes, those with all the gory details about the killings and mutilations inflicted on women by psychos (mostly American) are bought by women. And don’t ask me why. I don’t think I wish to know.
By the way, I want a photograph of you. My imagination is running out.
Yours, stoically impatient.
Maxim
* * * *
Dear Maxim,
Here you are.
Is this what you expected? Is this what you want?
Kate
* * * *
Dear Kate,
So this is you.
I don’t know what I truly expected. Really.
Yes. You.
Allow me to imagine the shape of your body under the long skirt of many colours that you are wearing (is that Seattle in the background, or Portland?), daringly guess the pallor of your breasts, the feel of your skin under my fingers skipping a gentle light fandango, how your body would feel naked against mine, flesh pressed against flesh, the smell of your skin, my tongue tasting you, the ineffable sensation of entering you for the first time.
I read in a book the other day that it rains in Seattle nine days out of ten.
Oh, how your wet cascading hair falls over your shoulders. A mental movie against the screen of my mind, raging images of bodies aflame as the storm invades my teacup of a brain and heart. Soft, invisible to the eye, blonde down in the small of your back. A dark beauty spot just below the lower curve of your right buttock. A brown mole where your small breasts take birth. Not opulent is the way you describe them.
If you were right now in London, we would be having an affair. Sneaking into cheap hotels, hunting for lies and excuses to the deception. Stealing brief evenings, weekends in search of always more forbidden joy. Would the sex be good? Impossible to say. Feverish, sweaty, shockingly intimate.
Come to think of it, there must also be a London of lovers. A London most of us know little about. A city where the geography is human as well as physical, where I should discover bars which are quiet and discreet, and I could take your hand in mine, without acquaintances spying. Where there are dark streets where I might slip my hand under your shirt and caress your shadowy nipples to hardness, alleys where our crotches might rub against each other with impunity.
Strange how the vision, the topology of a city can change according to circumstances, like a parallel world that exists contiguous to the one we know as normal, invisible but so close. In this one I sell books and write you foolish letters where I reveal the worst of my hidden self, in the other London, we fuck wondrously, mingle juices and sweat in unknown beds and awake blearily in the grey morning with my cock still embedded in you, a familiar geometry of desire and lazy friction binding our bodies together in adulterous ardour (you are married, aren’t you? Somehow I guess you must be, and of course you know I am too).
Kate, sweet sweet Kate, what are we to do?
With much affection.
Maxim
* * * *
Dear Maxim,
We meet in London. Certainly it must be London, the dark London of my imagination, the one from all the books full of fog and dread, the city of a thousand chimneys and unending parks where all policemen are polite like in a novel by Agatha Christie, where all the freaks fix you with mad, staring eyes like in the Factory books of Derek Raymond.
So we come together at last.
Six o’clock in a private club in Soho. We order drinks, make small talk and barely hear each other over the din of the regulars. Drinks over, you suggest we eat. We find a nearby Indian restaurant. The food is truly delicious. Then, a million things still unsaid, we move on to a pub. I imagine it’s in a basement. Clumsily, we try to explain our feelings, how we arrived at this crazy situation. Fleetingly you touch my thigh through the fabric of my dress. I buy the next round. What I don’t say is that you’re not quite the man I expected. Your hair is flecked with grey, you readily admit you’re slightly overweight. You’re probably thinking, she never said she was so tall, and your eyes can’t keep away from the small brown mole there at the onset of her cleavage.
‘I’ll drive you back to your hotel,’ he suggests as closing time approaches. ‘My car’s in a car park just round the corner.’
‘Yeah,’ she answers. ‘That’s no problem.’
The West End theatre crowds were in the midst of their daily exodus and it took another fifteen minutes to climb the serpentine path up the concrete bunker. At one stage, she gently put her hand on his, but the vehicle in front moved a yard or two, and he had to move his hand to disengage the handbrake.
Strange how odd moments live forever in your memory.
A touch of affection.
The blinding sound of yearning, of longing.
Outside the hotel, she kissed him lightly, between lips and cheek.
‘We’ll have to talk again,’ she said.
‘Yes,’ he agreed.
And here my imagination fails me. How do we end the story, Maxim? Does Kate pull a knife from her handbag and stab him to death, blood spurting in all directions over the wet, shiny London street? Or, in a fit of despair, knowing they have nowhere else to go from here, does Maxim gently put his fingers around Kate’s neck and strangle her? It’s what characters in his stories would do, isn’t it?
We both know too well there can be no happy ending, no desperate thrashing of bodies in hotel beds, sheets strewn to all poles, shrieks of orgasm equalling cries of death, no postcoital tenderness as fingers now explore opposite orfices with gentle care rather than brutal passion.
Tell me. Write me another ending.
Send me a mystery book where you don’t come to Seattle to camp on my doorstep, quarrel with my jealous husband and end up badly beaten up by the younger man. Where I arrive in London to see you and learn you were killed when two black armed robbers attacked the store on a Monday morning, looking for the Saturday takings.
No, you will not come to Seattle and I will not go to London.
And delete my name and address from the shop’s mail order records (and thank Thalia and the staff for the excellent service this past year).
So be it.
Kate
* * * *
Wondrous Kate,
So farewell then. By the way, I never did find out what colour were your eyes.
Sadly.
Maxim
* * * *
A cool morning in the American Northwest. Kate moves lazily from bedroom to bathroom, her long white nightdress trailing behind her on the wooden floor. Somehow, she senses that her state of mind is at last serene, appeased. She looks up at the small, square mirror of the medicine cabinet. She appears tired, she thinks. Her mind wanders, aimlessly. Her husband is away on a business trip; he is a financial journalist. She has the whole apartment to herself. She can’t remember the last time this happened. Today is a day off from the library. There are pale, darker shadows under her eyes, she peers closer into the cabinet mirror. Her eyes are dark brown. Soon, she and her husband (who often sleeps on the sofa at night after they have pointless rows) will move into their new house.
In London, eight hours time difference, Maxim wearily moves from bathroom to study, sighing, more flecks of grey in his daily growth of beard. The hell with it, today he doesn’t want to shave. Downstairs, the sounds of the kids readying for school. He pulls the old red Atlas out from one of the bulging shelves. America. Washington State. Oh yes, north of Oregon. Seattle, there it is. He gazes absently at the colours on the map, the blue of the Pacific, immense all the way to Russia, the brown and white of the mountains, the green of the Montana open country. Christ, it’s so far, he thinks. Far, much too far from London.