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By Root 2129 0

writer need not be ashamed, by which he could make a decent living. To produce something, saleable in large quantities to the public, which had absolutely nothing of myself in it; to sell something for which the kind of people I liked and respected, would have a use; that was what I sought, and detective stories fulfilled the purpose. They were an art which admitted of classical canons of technique and taste. Their writing was painful—though much less painful than any other form would have been—because I have the unhappy combination of being both lazy and fastidious. It was immune, anyway, from the obnoxious comment to which lighter work is exposed. “How you must revel in writing your delicious books, Mr. So-and-So.” My friend Roger Simmonds, who was with me at the University and set up as a professional humorist at the same time as I wrote Vengeance at the Vatican, is constantly plagued by that kind of remark. Instead, women say to me, “How difficult it must be to think of all those complicated clues, Mr. Plant.” I agree. “It is, intolerably difficult.” “And do you do your writing here in London?” “No, I find I have to go away to work.” “Away from telephones and parties and things?” “Exactly.”

I had tried a dozen or more retreats in England and abroad—country inns, furnished cottages, seaside hotels out of the season—Fez was by far the best of them. It is a splendid, compact city and in early March, with flowers springing everywhere in the surrounding hills and in the untidy patios of the Arab houses, one of the most beautiful in the world. I liked the little hotel. It was cheap and rather chilly—an indispensable austerity. The food was digestible with, again, that element of sparseness which I find agreeable. It had an intermediate place between the semi-Egyptian splendours of the tourists’ palace on the hill, and the bustling commercial hotels of the new town, half an hour’s walk away. The clientele was exclusively French; the wives of civil servants and elderly couples of small means wintering in the sun. In the evening Spahi officers came to the bar to play bagatelle. I used to work on the verandah of my room, overlooking a ravine where Senegalese infantrymen were constantly washing their linen. My recreations were few and simple. Once a week after dinner I took the bus to the Moulay Abdullah; once a week I dined at the Consulate. The consul allowed me to come to him for a bath. I used to walk up, under the walls, swinging my sponge-bag, through the dusk. He, his wife and their governess were the only English people I met; the only people, indeed, with whom I did more than exchange bare civilities. Sometimes I visited the native cinema where old, silent films were shown in a babel of catcalls. On other evenings I took a dose of Dial and was asleep by half past nine. In these circumstances the book progressed well. I have since, on occasions, looked back at them with envy.

As an odd survival of the age of capitulations there was at that time a British Post Office at the Consulate, used mainly, the French believed, for treasonable purposes by disaffected Arabs. When there was anything for me the postman used to come down the hill on his bicycle to my hotel. He had a badge in his cap and on his arm a brassard with the royal escutcheon; he invariably honoured me with a stiff, military salute which increased my importance in the hotel at the expense of my reputation as an innocent and unofficial man of letters. It was this postman who brought the news of my father’s death in a letter from my Uncle Andrew, his brother.

My father, it appeared, had been knocked down by a motor-car more than a week ago and had died without regaining consciousness. I was his only child and, with the exception of my uncle, his only near relative. “All arrangements” had been made. The funeral was taking place that day. “In spite of your father’s opinions, in the absence of any formal instructions to the contrary,” my Uncle Andrew wrote, “your Aunt and I thought it best to have a religious ceremony of an unostentatious kind.”

“He might have