Guilty by Definition by Susie Dent

Author:Susie Dent
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: ZAFFRE
Published: 2024-07-05T00:00:00+00:00

The chicken was excellent, and Martha let herself feel revived by it. Gemma was very good at making the person she was talking to feel interesting, at least when she tried, and she was trying now. Martha was grateful. She found herself talking about Berlin, Sabine, her old flat and the new job. For a moment Chorus and Charlie retreated and she felt an unfamiliar sense of being cared for, but she also noticed an incipient discomfort from talking only about herself.

‘How is Jonathan’s new book doing?’

‘Pretty well, really.’ Gemma pushed her plate aside. ‘It’s a difficult time of year for hardbacks, so I wasn’t surprised it didn’t break into the top ten this time. And as it’s a tie-in the newspapers tend not to review as heavily. There was a rather snippy paragraph in the Literary Review: I had to tell Jonathan to contain himself. No sock-puppeting this time, I warned him.’

‘Sock-puppeting?’

‘Yes. There’s a term for your dictionary pages. You didn’t hear about that episode, then? Good. That shows I’m doing my job. It was three years ago. Jonathan got angry about a review in The Telegraph, went on Amazon and gave the reviewer’s own book a one-star rating and a nasty review. Under a false name.’

‘Oh, that was reckless.’

She’d counselled enough authors in Germany herself to avoid doing anything like that. Although one had refused to listen and became embroiled in a tussle of review and counter-review on Goodreads.

‘Yes. Understandable on a human level, but bloody stupid,’ Gemma said, refilling their glasses. ‘Luckily the reviewer’s agent is a friend of mine. She called me and I read Jonathan the riot act. We managed to get it taken down quietly and Jonathan wrote a letter of apology, blaming it on a bad day and one whiskey too many. But I did find a few others.’

‘Others?’

‘Reviews on Amazon of works by his contemporaries. Highly immature and potentially very damaging to his career. Luckily, only The Telegraph reviewer had put two and two together, so they were all removed without anyone taking to social media.’

It was clear to Martha that, were it not for the wine, Gemma would not be sharing half of this. But it was undeniably useful to know. She remembered Jonathan’s tight smile as he listened to the news of another Shakespearean neologism being taken down.

‘Uneasy lies the head that wears the crown,’ she murmured.

‘Indeed. Now, are you doing anything over the bank holiday? And what about the Coronation?’

Martha was halfway through admitting her plans consisted entirely of reading and walking, with the possible exception of May Day morning, when her phone rang. It was Alex.

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