Like any writer I took these rejection and declinations – these harsh judgements on my work – pretty hard, but I haven’t given up. Nor has my valiant, plucky agent Simon Trewin of PFD in London, whose faith in my work is greater than my own. Curiously – and somewhat horribly – Mr Trewin became my agent in May last year only after my previous agent let me go after she read the manuscript in question. What’s uncanny – and somewhat horrible – about this is that in the first chapter of the manuscript the main character, a writer, is dropped by his agent after pitching an idea for a book which no-one wants to publish, and which bears an uncanny resemblance to the book I’ve written. (At the risk of big-noting myself, I should mention that my book is much better than his, although, of course, I wrote that one, too.) Many worse things happen in there which I am also anxious to not come true.
I haven’t given up hope, but I have lost a lot of faith – not in myself, but in the publishing industry, an industry that will, this year, deliver we lucky readers five different books about the convicted murderer Bradley John Murdoch. Not one or two – five. That my book is, in part, a satire on the current inclination toward the celebrification of homicidal maniacs, is pretty ironic, I suppose.

Far worse than a bad case of irony is the recent rejection of novels by V. S Naipaul and Stanley Middleton by twenty leading publishers and agents in London. In an exercise conducted by The Sunday Times, and reported in this paper last week, the opening chapters of Naipaul’s ‘In a Free State’ and Middleton’s second novel ‘Holiday’ were typed and submitted as works by aspiring authors. Of the twenty-one replies, all but one were rejections. Both authors are Booker prize winners, and Naipaul has won the Nobel prize for literature. Not that you’d know by the comments of his most recent detractors. “In order to take on a new author, several of us here would need to be extremely enthusiastic about both the content and writing style. I'm sorry to say we don't feel that strongly about your work,” wrote one literary agency representative. No mention of ‘brilliant’, ‘ingenious’ or ‘breath-taking’ – poor old Naipaul didn’t stand a chance with the gatekeepers of literary England.

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