Neck and Neck by Leo Bruce

Author:Leo Bruce
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Chicago Review Press
Published: 2018-05-05T16:00:00+00:00

12

I had arranged to meet Beef and Michael Thorogood at one o’clock in the Café Royal. It seemed the right sort of place for them to meet each other for the first time, but I need not have worried about the setting.

I had known Michael Thorogood since we were thirteen. We had been new boys together at our public school and, since our names both began with the letter T, we had friendship more or less thrust upon us. Curiously enough it had flourished on this forced incubation and had lasted for nearly twenty years. It had been really due to him that I had turned what had been a chance encounter with Sergeant Beef in his first big case, a murder case which he had successfully solved, into my first story. I had been having dinner with Michael, I remember, and telling him of that curious case when he turned to me and said, “Put it on paper, Lionel. I’ll get you a publisher if it’s any good.” I was looking round for a job at the time and was glad of something to do. Michael had given me a few hints—what to avoid in the telling of it, the rough length, and lots of other useful advice, but, even so, I found it was no easy task, however simply one attempted to tell a straight-forward story. It was finished at last and Michael approved. He found a publisher, and Beef duly had the gratification of seeing himself in print.

As I have said, I need not have worried about where or how Michael and Beef met.

“I’m delighted to meet you, Beef,” Michael Thorogood said as I introduced them. “Knowing your character from our friend Townsend’s books, I suppose I should really get you a tankard of beer, but somehow I think you’d like to join me in a whisky and soda.”

After that they were off. Michael had a pretty good knowledge of my books about Beef—I suspect he had spent the evening before glancing through them. He did not, like so many people, under-rate the ex-policeman or suppose that his rubicund exterior hid a plethoric intelligence. He had arranged for us to have a table well on its own, and after I had ordered I let Michael talk.

“You want to know something about Ridley’s firm, Thomas Thayer. Well, before I start I must say that it will be highly slanderous, so don’t quote me, Lionel, in your book. Personally I would never have any dealings with them at all. It’s a wicked blood-sucking business. They advertise all over the place for new writers, and such is the vanity of the human race that hundreds fall for it. In would come the manuscripts, novels, short stories, poems, family histories, accounts of sport, books on shooting, hunting and fishing, belles lettres. The whole lot. The wonderful line in their advertisement that scored a bull every time was, ‘Every man or woman has the material for at least one book. Why don’t you write yours?’ And they did.

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