MONO ISSUE 2 - Flipbook - Page 23
LITERARY AGENTS
by Kate Tyte
THE DATE WAS THE first of April. The newspaper headline was “Highhopes Crushed!” I
know the feeling, pal, I said to myself. Minty Highhopes had rejected my police
procedural the year before. “Hardly bestseller material,” he’d said. I imagined the
feeling of terror he must have had, right before that stack of unread manuscripts came
toppling down on him, crushing him flatter than a flat-earther’s fantasy. Helluva way to
die. Good joke, though.
One month later, Penny Dreadful’s laptop exploded while she was giving some naive
scribbler the old thanks-but-no-thanks. The keys burst out so hard forensics spent five
hours picking all the letters out of her. Several innocent bystanders were hurt. The
head of Foreign Rights is going about now with the word ‘Delete’ branded on the centre
of his forehead.
Two weeks later they found the lead agent at Crankemout and Pilemup lying on the
floor, dead from smoke inhalation, spread-eagled in a pentangle of charred thrillers
and staked to the ground with paperclips. The smoke alarms had been disabled. I
shook my head over those paperclips. What a way to ruin a good second-hand suit.
That’s when Scotland Yard assigned yours truly, Sam Sniff, to the case. Pretty soon I
got wind of a plot to burn down a warehouse full of bestsellers by Max Thrills. I know I
should have done something, but what the hell, I thought, Max Thrills was a guy who
didn’t know the first thing about police work. He had rich guys talking to cops instead
of shutting tighter than a clam and leaving their lawyers to it. He had cops on
surveillance drinking endless coffee as if it wouldn’t go through you like Niagara Falls
through a straw. The Max Thrills warehouse fire lit up the sky like the Blackpool
Illuminations switching on.
After I let that one slide out of personal aggravation it was open season. I sat in my
Ford Focus outside the offices of Cheatham and Cheatham, sucking on an oat-milk
latte, while the poisoned magazines got delivered. Bloody white froth foamed out of
the mouth of the corpse and there were long gouges on the rug where she’d caught her
heels as she writhed around like a cheap pole-dancer with a stolen pole. When the
killer broke into a Hampstead home, gagged the victim with the latest airport novel and
scored the words ‘not quite the right fit for us,’ onto an agent’s flesh with a fountain
pen before bludgeoning him to death with a hardback copy of 'My Struggle' by Karl Ove
Knausgård, I watched through my binoculars and shrugged. My bosses put the
pressure on, but I continued to be baffled by the case. The killer’s like a ghost, chief, I
said. They never leave a trace. This one really dots the Ts and crosses the Is.
The chattering classes were transfixed. Rewards were offered. Authors went trotting
into the offices of The Guardian, each of them claiming to be the killer, like a crowd of
badly-dressed amateur Spartacuses. A good scandal does wonders for sales figures.
They bombarded the police hotline with tales of the suspicions they’d always had
about their better-reviewed rivals. Agents started publishing lengthy apologies to all
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