This week I zipped through an entertaining Nelson de Mille yarn called “The Lion.”  At the end of the novel, I noticed a note from the author which alerted me to the fact that a half dozen people had paid (with generous donations to charity) for their names to be used for characters in the novel.

It’s a great idea, though I was disappointed that all of the donors were “good” characters in the book. Given that “The Lion” is about a nutjob Islamic terrorist, de Mille was probably lucky that all his donors had names like Miller and Gompich. What would he have done if someone named Muhammad al-Fawwar had lobbed a couple of grand to the Fantomi Anemia Trust? (I know, he’d have given that name to the “good Arab” character, a policeman who – and this is no spoiler because it’s obvious long before it happens – is one of the people sliced up by the nutjob Islamist.)

Still this got me thinking. If De Mille did a little charitable placement, perhaps there are more lucrative opportunities for crime fiction product placement. After all, unless de Mille could somehow write off the charitable donations, what was in it for him? Oh, yes, I forgot about fellow-feeling and good will. Forgive me, but I live in the Middle East and there’s not a lot of it about…

Wouldn’t Mitt Romney’s campaign pay me more than a pittance to have a bad guy in my novel named Barack Aboma, a Muslim from Kenya? Or perhaps Obama would like to sponsor my forthcoming (funding allowing) novel about a Mormon president bent on destroying the world because of its evil addiction to caffeinated beverages?

Crime fiction product placement could extend beyond the mere naming of characters. Writers have frankly been easy lays for big corporations. Whereas a Coke never appears on-screen without a major contribution to the production, Andy McNab’s SAS hero Nick Stone is always stopping to pick up some crisps and a coke when on mission without, I believe, compensation.

So how about a shakedown? Not only should a writer now approach a corporation with a suggestion that, let’s say, if Philip Morris wants a detective smoking Marlboros they’d better pay up, there should be a threat implicit: Don’t pay up, and the detective will smoke Camels…with great pleasure. Or even better, the bad guy will smoke Marlboros and die of cancer. His lady henchwoman will smoke Virginia Slims and die of emphycema. The bad guy will torture the hero with cigarette butts, which will be particularly painful because they’ll be Chesterfields. And the hero will be offered a Benson and Hedges by the incompetent small-town cop and refuse it with a snort of disgust. (All Philip Morris products, in case you didn’t get it.)

I have my own shakedown planned for my next novel. There’s going to be a “bad” American bank in the story. I plan on contacting Citibank and JP Morgan Chase, etc., to see which one is prepared to pay the most to have their rival slandered as a Mafiosi drug-laundering den of iniquity.

Alternatively, given recent drug money-laundering news, I could approach Standard Chartered and Deutsche Bank with an offer to have the novel’s hero working for them to clean up the world’s black economy. If they have any money left after paying their money-laundering fines…

I’d seen “The Robespierre Serial” on my parents shelves for years. It was published in 1975, so I assume it must’ve been up there since I was eight. I knew the cover because, even as a kid, there was something compelling about a southern European country scene viewed through the sights of a sniper. I finally got around to reading it on a recent visit and discovered it’s quite a gem.

Nicholas Luard, the author, smirks from the back cover of the Book Club Associates Edition. It may have been this author photo that had prevented me reading it when I had picked it up before. His chin is on his hand (a definite “thoughtful, creative type” strike against); he looks French (great in a woman, but not so fabulous, I’ve found, when it comes to crime fiction); and what hair can be seen appears to be in one of those long-at-the-sides ‘Seventies combovers favored back then by Paul Simon.

It turns out Luard was rather an unconventional man. He was descended from Huguenots fleeing France for religious freedom in Britain. He befriended Peter Cook (whose comedy sketches, my wife can attest, I have frequent occasion to recite verbatim) and founded The Establishment Club. Which was anti-Establishment, in the way that only true silver-spoon members of the Establishment are allowed to be. He died in 2004, having written a number of spy novels and some memoirs. They’re all out of print.

Luard also had a compelling military background, in a reconnaissance unit of the Coldstream Guards. This resulted in one of the two things I found most interesting about “The Robespierre Serial.” His military and survivalist details are excellent, as his main character Carswell is forced to hike through the mountains of Spain with a French woman (lucky him) in tow.

The first thing that struck me about “The Robespierre Serial,” however, was how fine the writing was in comparison with much of today’s crime fiction. True, it’s a spy novel, and spy novels tend to be written with a little more “literary” finesse than detective books. Perhaps that’s because the writer assumes that a reader is more likely to want to delve into the characters and be less dependent on action than a detective junky. Perhaps it’s just that they want to read like Le Carré.

Nonetheless “The Robespierre Serial” stands out for the quality of Luard’s descriptive writing. His dialogue lets him down – he clearly decided to drift into the land of Boy’s Own comics for much of the speech in the book. The construction of the book’s title suggests he was after a Ludlum crowd (and I’ve no idea really why “Robespierre” and why “Serial”) and the characters speak with all the banality of the Bourne types. However, they think in complex elliptical patterns that are fascinating.

Luard also constructs a very supple plot, in which the reader knows what’s happened in a moment and sees clearly how that one mistake has caused everything that follows. When writing about the British secret services, after all, it’s more accurate to put everything down to bumbling than to Bond-like superiority.

Do read the book. Then write and tell me why Luard’s spies refer to the defector as Robespierre (at least, I think they do) and why it –– whatever “it” is –– is also designated by the spooks as a “serial”.

The great Italian painter Caravaggio was threatened with death by the Knights of Malta and by the family of a man he had slain in a duel and was in love with one of his models, according to a scoop in The News of the World which was never published because of the demise of the London tabloid.

The News of the World, which was closed by owner Rupert Murdoch because of a phone-hacking scandal, appears to have gathered its information for the Caravaggio scoop by hacking into the early-Baroque painter’s voicemail.

“Caravaggio, you’re a dead man,” said one unidentified caller from a number with a Maltese country code. “We’re coming to get you.”

Another caller, whose number had a Roman area code, claimed responsibility for an attack which left Caravaggio scarred and said it was in revenge for killing Ranuccio Tomassoni in a duel in 1605. The scar was intended to mark him with shame. “But now we’ve decided to get rid of you for good,” the voice mail says.

Voice messages from a girl named Lena, the model for some of Caravaggio’s most well-known Madonnas, are described as “steamy” and “saucy” by The News of the World article.

Matt Rees, whose novel about the mysterious death of Caravaggio “A Name in Blood” was published this month in the UK, says the voice mails show that Caravaggio was ahead of his time as a painter and as a user of technology. “I’m convinced by the evidence, for example, that he used a camera obscura to obtain his characteristic light-dark effect, because he was aware of the latest scientific discoveries,” says Rees.

“I’m sure the cellphone he had in those days, however, must’ve been one of the big old ones with the separate battery pack. It’d look a lot less modern today than one of the paintings Caravaggio made four hundred years ago and which have had such an effect on the way we look at images today.”

The voice mails don’t resolve the debate over how Caravaggio died, Rees points out. “Art historians often say he died of nothing more than a fever, and the voice mails leave us wondering if it was the Knights of Malta, the Tomassoni relatives, or perhaps someone else,” Rees says. “To really understand what happened, you’d have to read ‘A Name in Blood.’”

(Last week I wrote chapter 1 of a novel called Blurbworld!, set in a dystopian land where the main character can only think in the overblown cliché of the publicity blurbs authors provide for the jackets of other authors’ books. Chapter 2 naturally takes us into Reviewworld! where things get really nasty.)

Raymond Chandler said that drinking was like making love to a woman. The first time is intimate, but by the third time you just undress the girl. Well, here she was on my desk in my office in Newport, a once-shabby industrial town in Wales that’s now mysteriously become quite pleasant. She was dark-haired, pale-skinned, wearing fishnets, and she needed my help. I opened the drawer and took out the office bottle. She quoted that bit from Chandler.

“So let’s get intimate,” I responded. We clinked glasses. The fruit juice was a little sickly, but refreshing.

“Why no whisky?” she asked.

“I’m a writer. Do you think I can afford alcohol? Ebooks are eating the publishing industry alive.”

She picked up the bottle. “From concentrate. Poor quality and thin on plot.”

“So what is it you really need from me?” (Readers will recall I asked her that at the end of last week’s installment. Quite a cliffhanger. Well, now we’re over the cliff and up the creek.)

“Let me tell you about my sister,” she said. “Luvaine is a wild ride, a literary tour de force, whose spark enlivens every room into which she spins.”

“Sounds like a seminal, unmissable female event. Where do we find her?”

“As she might say, the novelist’s art consists of being present and absent, that she is most herself by simultaneously being someone else. This seems exactly true to me about Luvaine. She isn’t trapped by the narrowness of veracity, by having to conform to a certain version of reality.”

I grew less positive. I had heard this kind of shit before. “Oh, Jesus, is she Nicole Krauss?”

“But with a difference.” The girl smiled. Her smile was like the whisky bottle in my office: not really there, but wished for. The chemistry between us was palpable on the page. It crackled across the screen. (I had fitted screens because they reminded me of America and noir novels, even though there are no mosquitoes in South Wales.)

“What’s the twist, sugar?” I sneered.

“She’s dead.”

“That’s good for a crime fiction blog. Not so good for Luvaine.”

“But it’s also reality. An amped up, rollercoaster ride that’ll have you reaching for your antacid and your red pencil.”

“I guess you want me to find out who killed your sister?”

She reached down and stroked my jaw. “No, baby. I want you to fly with me to New York.”

(Blurbworld! is a crime/romance/sci-fi/satirical novel to be serialized here and on my blog in coming months. A blurb is a comment highlighted on the cover of a book, usually provided by another author or culled from a review. They’re often misleading and typically repeat a somewhat tired comparative trope: eg. “Jonathan Safran Foer is the Philip Roth of vegetarianism.” Imagine that awful world. Now step inside….)

The methane stink of the steelworks, manufacturer of our economy’s most vital product, rose through the damp air of Newport, the Middlesboro of South Wales, as I prepared for the first day of my book tour. A stunning new novel, a stylish new voice. I unwrapped the golden foil of a Sissi Taler and cracked through the bitter chocolate to the apricot-marzipan truffle cream beneath.  An exquisite combination. Then she came in.

She was slim and dark-haired with skin like the finish on a BMW Z4 Roadster (Joy’s Inner Beauty Illuminates It). From the tiny carved lovespoon dangling off the zip of her shoulder bag, I knew she was Welsh. She was tough and sexy, the Welsh Lauren Bacall, except that she wasn’t blonde. I’d have said she was the Welsh Catherine Zeta Jones, except that Catherine Zeta Jones is Welsh. I saw that she had shattered my cool. I slipped out of blurbing.

“How did you get in here, sweetheart?” I asked.

“Better ask how you’re going to get me out of here.” She winked with the stylish poise of literary fiction and the breakneck pace of a thriller.

I saw then that no matter how I tried to forget that I lived in Blurbland!, Blurbland! owned me. It was in everything I said and read, all the words I heard, engraved in every surface of every object around me. I dreamed of blurbs and, so, my therapist suggested my blurbs contained some hidden nugget of truth I should ferret out. I told my therapist I thought blurbs were just there to get your own name on the cover of someone else’s book and thence to persuade an occasional reader to give your novels a try. “That’s pretty promiscuous,” my therapist said, “and promiscuity is an easy opportunity for escape from reality, as Jung said.”

“Jung, the Freud of Switzerland,” I said.

“See what I mean?” said my therapist, who is first-rate, astonishing, splendid, an utterly convincing character.

“But blurbs aren’t really true. There are other motives for saying the things we read in blurbs, and we can’t possibly know them, and yet they’re set before us as if they were true.”

“Blurbs, then, are the unconscious of their writers, transmitted through a set of distantiated barriers to reality.”

He really will blow your mind, I thought. Mind-blowing, I edited.

The musk of the girl’s perfume and the shape of her leg drew me back to my office, as she slipped herself onto the edge of my desk.

“I’m here to interview you about your new book,” she purred. “It’s an acute portrayal of a man driven to despair whose only choice is to face down the dark forces pursuing him.”

“Quite.” I pushed the box of chocolates toward her. “Would you like a Sissi Taler? They’re the ––”

“––Empress of the Mozartkugel line.”

I gasped. “Yes, yes.”

She took out a notebook and sucked at the end of her pen. “I’m thinking of calling you the Stieg Larsson of South Wales.”

“I prefer to think of myself as the Graham Greene of Gwent.” Gwent was the county where Newport was situated. It was notable – at least to those who didn’t live there — mostly for the motorway that ran, quickly, through it.

“Yes, but I don’t think people really know that reference.”

“Gwent? You think it should be Monmouth?” The county’s name was changed from Monmouth to Gwent in the ‘Seventies. Then part of it was changed back again, but another part retained the new name. No one could ever remember which bit was named what.

“No, Graham Greene. He sounds like a BBC Radio 4 humourist or a Liberal Democrat. The Minister of State for Agriculture and Fisheries.”

Had I not wanted to have sex with her, I would have been affronted. “Greene was the Joseph Conrad of late-Twentieth Century English letters.”

“It won’t do. How do you like the Mickey Spillane of Spytty?” she said. Spytty was an urban neighbourhood of Newport famous for being not so nice. It was pronounced “spitty.”

“Perhaps you’d agree to the Philip Roth of Risca?” I suggested. Risca was an area on the edge of Newport. It had a dangerous-sounding name but was famous for nothing.

“Philip Roth? Did you marry a Communist?” she tapped the end of her pen against her teeth and poked the tip of her tongue out. “Or do you have a romantic attachment to refrigerated liver?”

She’d taken the initiative from the moment she came in. I decided to reassert myself. I stood up from my desk chair, brushed a crumb of Sissi Taler from my lip, and leaned in close. “No romantic attachment to liver or to anything else, sweetheart,” I said. “Now why don’t you tell me why you really came here?”

The wait for a successor to Amadeusis over.