an eye at Atkins. ‘Not a word to your pals at the Lamb, mind.’
‘What d’you take me for?’ Atkins gathered up the dishes. ‘Time you was dressed to go and see your publisher, isn’t it? Money don’t wait, you know, Colonel.’
Denton had sent his editor a note asking to see him at eleven. It wasn’t a meeting he wanted to have: he hated asking for anything, especially money; he hated having to admit that his book was in the trash. Still—
‘He must needs go whom the devil driveth,’ he said. He clambered out of the chair.
Chapter Fifteen
‘Horrors! Horrors, Denton! I want horrors.’
Diapason Lang had been his English editor since Denton’s second book. Lang was older than Denton, almost emaciated, his skin taut over his cheekbones but ruddy with good health. His father had been a noted organist, hence the first name. Denton liked him well enough but found Lang’s seemingly wilful mislabelling of his books as ‘horror’ irritating. More than irritating, in fact.
He had come to his publishers by way of Mrs Johnson’s, charging her again to mobilize her women for an assault on the Metropolitan Schools Board. She had, with a toughness she usually masked, pointed out that the women hadn’t been paid in full as yet. Embarrassed, Denton had stood at her door and counted out notes, then coins, not finding it easy to make up the total. ‘The bonus - for finding each Mulcahy - ah, I’ll bring that by - another time—’ He had walked away very quickly.
And so he had come to his publishers. The firm was in a narrow building off Fleet Street, only two houses from the one once occupied by Izaak Walton; it had a look of untidiness that correctly embodied the business it housed: door jambs tilted, floors sagged, cracks in the plaster had become so institutionalized that baseboards had been cut to accommodate them. Yet the firm itself was a good one with a notable backlist in fiction and botany, the combination pure accident, the reasons no longer remembered. Diapason Lang had been with them for more than thirty years and was in good part responsible for the fiction list. A type not unknown among editors, he often misunderstood the books he selected but selected well, nonetheless. Like his saying now, ‘Horrors, Denton! I want horrors!’ Then he leaned forward and said, as if they were friends with a common passion, ‘You know!’
In fact, Denton didn’t know. He would never have told Lang that he was there because if he didn’t get some money, his manservant was going to leave him; and he hadn’t yet had the gumption to tell Lang that he had decided to abandon the book that he was due to deliver in three months. Or - the worst - that he nonetheless wanted another advance. ‘I’m never quite sure what you mean by “horror”,’ he muttered. Playing for time.
Denton hadn’t started out to be a horror writer - if that’s what he was, and he didn’t see it - or in fact to be a writer at all. All he’d managed to become after the war was a failing young farmer who didn’t know he was failing, able to keep going by not adding up his debts. Then, after he failed completely and everything was gone, his wife dead and his sons sent off to his sister because he had failed as a father, too, he had gone farther west and rattled about, done his marshalling, gone on to California. Then he’d begun writing because his head was so stuffed with sorrow he thought it would burst, and he had had to get it out. He had written half of a novel called William Read before he realized it was self-pitying claptrap - more failure. Then, disciplining the self-pity by realizing that it was not the same thing as sorrow, he had begun to set down experiences as if he were writing instructions on how to harness a team to a plough, and the result was The Demon of the Plains. That first novel ended with the farmer-hero hanging himself in the barn he had built with his own hands, and his body being wrapped in a horse blanket, already frozen, and stacked with the cordwood until the ground might thaw enough to bury him. Denton had found his method: a plain, unfeeling style that embodied appalling events.
The Demon of the Plains had given him a reputation beyond America. The French had made comparisons to Poe