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The Decoy was a big departure for me - an international thriller
mainly set in New York, with a fairly 'commercial' cast of characters,
including a necrophiliac serial killer who recruits both collaborators
and victims in a MUSE (that's internet-speak for Multi-User
Simulated Environment - an online virtual community). But all
that came later - when I conceived the story, what excited me
was the notion of an actress who has to pretend to fall in love
with a suspected killer, so that a police psychologist can examine
the suspect's responses and compare them to a profile of the
killer. English readers will instantly recognise this as having
similarities with a famous case in which a psychologist working
with the police, Paul Britton, constructed a decoy operation
where a policewoman approached a man suspected of killing a
pretty blonde mother, Rachel Nickell. The trial judge threw
the case out and criticised the police for straying into entrapment.
Paul Britton wrote a book, The Jigsaw Man, which tells
the story from his point of view; later the suspect, a man called
Colin Stagg, co-authored a book, Who Really Killed Rachel?,
telling the same story from his own perspective (although interestingly,
while Paul Britton's book was a bestseller, many bookshops refused
to stock Stagg's - presumably still believing that he was guilty
by implication). Reading both books gives a fascinating insight
into how two people can 'see' the same events and draw two entirely
different conclusions from them. That discrepancy - and the
murky, morally ambiguous nature of any decoy operation - was
what gave me the germ for The Decoy.
I ended up with the book I actually wrote for many different reasons.
First, I thought it was right to distance my plot from a real-life
tragedy, particularly given that no one has ever been convicted
of the killing. Secondly, I liked the idea that my heroine, an actress,
had already been involved in decoy operations on a much smaller
scale, by working as a 'decoy' for a detective agency, flirting
with straying husbands to gather evidence on behalf of their wives.
There had been a lot of publicity about these decoy agencies at
the time I wrote the book, but they seemed to me to be something
that was more credible in America than Europe. And setting it in
America meant that my actress immediately had a strong reason to
co-operate with the police, particularly if she was working without
a Green Card.
To me, America means noir - The Big Sleep, and Farewell My Lovely,
and more modern classics like Chinatown and LA Confidential. So
I leapt at the chance to create a noir hero in a secondary part:
the lugubrious, world-weary, but fundamentally decent detective
Frank Durban. I also wrote the book in what felt to me like a slightly
American accent, with very short paragraphs and lots of snappy Chandleresque
aphorisms:
She's not the most beautiful of Henry's girls. In her opinion,
that would be Alana.
Alana has the hair of an urchin, the voice of a little girl, and
the figure of the model she used to be before she hit twenty seven
and the bookings began to dry up. Alana is neurotic as a thoroughbred,
and her habitually-bare midriff is taut as a squash racquet.
Sometimes, though, there are men oblivious to Alana's cover-girl
charms, and these men usually go for Lizzie. Or, more specifically,
they go for Lizzie's breasts. Lizzie's breasts are big and creamy
and undulate like a waterbed when she moves, which isn't very
often. Claire especially covets the left one, the one with the
scorpion tattoo on its upper slope.
Then there's Lola. Whilst pretty isn't exactly a word you would
use to describe Lola, she definitely has her fans. Half Japanese,
half Jewish, with the unfathomable eyes of a geisha and the filthy
mouth of a Brooklyn pimp, Lola used to be a stripper at a table
dancing club. Where her speciality was that for an extra fifty
she would lean over the punter's lap and, underneath the curtain
of her long black hair, violate the club's no-touching rule for
about ten seconds or so. She didn't even bother to undo their
zippers, she told Claire once. She didn't need to.
Claire never liked to ask how Henry found Lola.
But though she might not be the prettiest, or the sexiest, or
the sassiest, Claire has one quality that, as far as Henry's concerned,
makes her unique.
She gets results.
Henry maintains it's because there's something about her that
makes her seem more approachable than his other girls. Claire
knows that isn't true. It's because, alone amongst his decoys,
she can act.
Paul, who runs the class she's joined, likes to say acting is
called that because it's all about action. It's not who you pretend
to be, but who you become; not what you say, but what you do.
Claire isn't sure. Maybe this Method stuff she's learning is just
Hollywood bullshit.
But she's seen actors go on stage with a streaming cold and have
it dry up for three hours, only to start sneezing again when the
make-up comes off in the green room.
And she's seen men who would throw away everything they have -
wives, fiancées, families, careers - just for the chance
of a few minutes with a figment of their imaginations.
With her.
Claire isn't proud of what she does for a living.
But she's proud as hell of the way that she does it.
My copy-editor hated it. She rewrote the whole thing in English,
with proper grammar, punctuation, and paragraphs, and sent it to
be proofed without showing me. Since proof copies - uncorrected
proof copies - are what gets sent to reviewers, I was somewhat peeved.
In fact, I made them reproof it exactly the way I wrote it. (Raymond
Chandler once wrote to a copy-editor "When I split an infinitive,
by God, I mean it to stay split," so I reckoned I
was in good company.)
The Decoy was optioned by a Hollywood producer even before I'd
finished writing it. The studio commissioned a script from a major
Hollywood scriptwriter, and briefed him to turn it into a light,
humorous crime caper. Well, of course. That script never got made,
so much later I wrote my own. Writing the script made me realise
what an odd book it is - there are a lot of plot twists in there
which aren't strictly necessary. In fact, I realised as I wrote
the book that I was constructing every single scene so that it contained
a twist or revelation, right from the first chapter on. Did I overcomplicate
it, or was I cunningly letting the scene construction echo the shape
of the whole book? You tell me.
A reader wrote to me saying that he loved the book but I was clearly
influenced by John le Carré's The Little Drummer Girl.
I love le Carré, but couldn't remember that book, which I'd
read as a teenager. I went back and reread it, and - Ah. Yes, there
are big similarities (though his, of course, is a much better book).
If I'd known about that while I was writing I probably wouldn't
have been able to finish it.
Someday I'll write a sequel to The Decoy. Deception is such a wonderful
theme, particularly when deception of others turns into deception
of yourself.
Incidentally, the translations of Les Fleurs du Mal are
my own - Baudelaire wrote in a long, languid meter which held up
the pace, so I ruthlessly trimmed the original poems to suit my
own purposes. Apologies to any purists out there…
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