His obvious relief at being given an escape route from my continual questioning resulted in him pulling together a list of names which was like a who’s who of Swinging London. Most of them were old enough to now have some time on their hands and would enjoy reminiscing about their glory days. They all had fond memories of their times with Pete and were happy to talk about him at length. The ruse, it seemed, was working.
I collected together all the stories and ran them by Pete, who happily confirmed all of them, often embellishing them even further. We were off and running. The newspaper deal was done, the book was printed up and was scheduled to go into the shops the second day of the newspaper serialisation.
The night before the first part was due to appear in the paper I bumped into one of the people who had supplied me with stories and he enquired how the project was going and who else I had seen after him. I named someone who was a good friend of his as well as Pete’s.
‘Really,’ he said. ‘How is he? He will have told you some porkies.’
‘You think?’ I laughed, assuming he was teasing.
‘Absolutely,’ he said, ‘but then I told you a fair few porkies too.’
‘Did you?’ I think my laugh may now have carried the slightest touch of hysteria.
‘Yes,’ he said, his accompanying chuckle entirely hysteria-free. ‘But none of the porkies he and I told you will be anything to the ones Pete will have dished up.’
Frozen is probably what my smile was by that stage. The book was printed and crated and heading towards the back doors of bookshops all over the country. Would this be the moment to ring the publisher and report this little conversation? I decided it would make me sound alarmist, maybe even naive. Best to hold on and see what happened. Maybe he was just kidding.
The following morning the first part of the serialisation was splashed across the middle pages of the paper, flagged up mightily on the front page. A few hours later lawyers’ letters began to be delivered to the newspaper’s offices suggesting that some of the stories were entire fabrications and enquiring what the editor intended to do about it.
The editor intended to get very cross indeed as it turned out. The publisher was hauled over the coals and rang Pete, who cheerfully denied all knowledge of any of the stories he was being challenged on. Fortunately, I had all our conversations on tape and could prove that I had not made any of it up. The books were recalled and pulped, everyone apologised to everyone and Pete went to the pub that evening as if nothing had happened. For him it was just one more incident in a life full of such incidents, another anecdote to be told to his mates, who could then roar with laughter and slap him merrily on the back.
Really, the old boy should write a book.
Soldiers’ tales
Two soldiers with stories to tell arrived in my life in one week. One was a man who had joined up to serve his country and support his young wife and child after leaving school without many qualifications. His short, brave adventure in a foreign land had left him a shaking wreck, trying to survive on an inadequate disability pension. We met in a pub where he was hardly able to lift his pint to his lips without spilling it. The second soldier was a smart little officer who was chauffeured to our lunch date at the Ritz. Since leaving the British Army he had become notorious for building a highly profitable mercenary force which was rumoured in some quarters to use ‘excessive force’. I’d met prefects like him at school and had always made sure to give them a wide berth, but I thought it would be interesting to find out what he had been up to – a sort of real-life Flashman.
One of these soldiers talked with painful honesty about his experiences while the other was evasive, constantly alluding to things that he ‘couldn’t talk about’, and apparently very pleased with himself. Neither of them was anything like any of the stereotypical British soldiers I had been brought up to expect.
Having had a ‘good war’, my parents were very well disposed towards the armed forces. Many of my relatives were full-time servicemen who had reached high ranks. I had read Biggles (albeit not enjoying his escapades as much as the Scarlet Pimpernel’s and Dr Syn’s), and watched John Mills, David Niven, Kenneth More and other British gents behaving very finely in the black and white films we were shown at school on alternate Saturday evenings during the winter terms. Many centuries of romantic tales of noble knights and fearless warriors provided the building blocks for the mythical figures that were paraded before us then, and those that still stride around the imaginations of new generations in the militaristic computer games that sell by the million.
No one, it seemed from listening to these two soldiers and several others who came forward to tell their stories in the wake of successful authors like Andy McNab and Chris Ryan, had had anything close to a ‘good war’ since 1945.
The horror of guerrilla warfare and improvised explosive devices, the bullying by the Americans with their ‘Napalm in the morning’ in Vietnam and ‘shock and awe’ in Iraq, and the relentless crushing of every small country that stood in the way of the Soviet military machine, had left men with terrible tales that were very different to anything I had heard or read during my childhood.
After being part of a highly successful operation in Iraq, Andy McNab and Chris Ryan had both turned their personal ‘knights’ tales’ into bestselling thrillers and themselves into publishing brands. A great many other soldiers strove to follow the same path. Meanwhile senior officers who would once have written dry battlefield accounts with stiff upper lips were forced by modern readers’ tastes to talk more about the emotional side of warfare and soldiering, draining still further the heroic myths that had grown so powerful during the first half of the twentieth century, with the help of Hollywood.
The public will always want heroes but now they expect believable, rounded ones. It’s all right for soldiers to talk about fear and pain and missing their families, just as it is all right for other people to talk about unhappy childhoods in other autobiographies. Heroes now tend to be mavericks rather than ‘military machines’ as they might once have been proud to be known. The recruiters can no longer expect to get away with the same blatant, one-dimensional propaganda they might have been able to use a hundred years ago because the potential Western soldier is more knowing, better educated and has become able to show a more human face to the world just as warfare itself has become more technological and less human.
The potential power of these modern soldiers’ stories, however, did not escape the notice of the Ministry of Defence, who called me into their inner sanctum to meet one particular man whose story they felt summed up the modern stresses and strains of soldiering particularly well. He and I were sucked in through one security zone after another until we found ourselves sitting together in a room, which felt distinctly padded, with a coffee machine and a code number should we want to escape back out onto the street.
I liked him and I liked the story so I prepared a synopsis for them as requested. The publishers we approached, however, smelled a propaganda rat and did not take the bait.
Win a ghost of your own
It’s always a treat to receive unexpected calls from editors in large publishing houses. If they have got as far as looking up your number and picking up the phone the chances are that they have something genuinely interesting to offer. This voice, however, sounded slightly less confident than such august folk usually are when planning to dispense largesse to hungry authors.
‘Ummm,’ she said, ‘I don’t know how you will feel about this, but …’ I was on the edge of my seat to know what was coming next, ‘we’re setting up a competition for viewers of Richard & Judy to send in their stories and the three winners are going to be given a publishing deal …’ she hesitated again, ‘… and a ghostwriter.’
This was a time when Richard and Judy, the king and queen of afternoon sofa television, were at the peak of their success and were running a book club on air, which was making bestsellers of books that would previously have been lucky to earn out the
ir advances. Their muscle in the UK publishing industry (or at least their producer’s muscle) was comparable to Oprah’s influence over the US publishers. In fact, their producer was frequently named as the most powerful person in publishing.
‘Would you be at all interested in taking that on?’ she finished.
‘So,’ I said, wanting to be entirely sure that I understood the deal on offer here, ‘you have no idea what the stories will be about or how good they will be?’
‘None at all,’ she laughed nervously.
‘So it’s possible you won’t get anything that could remotely be described as a potential book?’
‘That is a risk. There is also a risk that we will be inundated by tens of thousands of stories and we will have to read through them all. It’s all a bit of a risk.’
‘So who will do the judging?’
‘The public.’
‘The public?’
‘Well, we’ll be narrowing it down to six finalists and then they will vote for the one they want to win.’
‘But the public might vote for something which is great in a five-minute television segment but has no back story that we can draw on to build a narrative …’
‘Like I say,’ she gave another nervous laugh, ‘a bit of a risk.’
‘I’d love to,’ I said because I am a freelancer and freelancers are hard-wired never to say no to an offer of work just in case they never get another one, and I actually rather relished the challenge of taking whatever stories were given to me and finding ways of spinning them out to book length.
The ‘True’ competition was announced (Judy sweetly described part of the prize as being the services of ‘a world class ghostwriter’) and the entries poured in. People in the publisher’s office and the producer’s office started the sorting process and the best ones were filmed and made into items for the show. The public then voted. By that stage the publisher had realised that asking one ghost to write all three books in the sort of timeframe they would need if they wanted to publish while the public still remembered the competition was perhaps a little unrealistic. Instead, I was contracted to write two of them and someone else would handle the third.
As it turned out there were three strong winners and the overall champion became Betrayed, which I wrote for Lyndsey Harris. For the first few years of her life Lyndsey’s daughter, Sarah (not their real names), was a normal, happy, popular girl. But from the age of six she was targeted by a vicious, manipulative but invisible enemy – and her life became a living hell. Before long she was suspended from school, alienated from her friends, completely bewildered and utterly terrified. Her happy childhood had been destroyed for ever. For Lyndsey it was a life beyond her worst nightmares. Her little girl, the daughter she loved so much, seemed to have transformed overnight – into a child she hardly recognised, stealing razor blades, trying to poison her friends, accusing her parents of abuse. Suddenly Lyndsey was fighting to keep her family together and to save her daughter’s sanity. But then the horrific truth started to become clear, and both Lyndsey and Sarah discovered they had been the innocent victims of the most horrifying betrayal imaginable …
Betrayed went straight to the top of the bestseller charts. Richard and Judy had triumphed yet again.
The runner-up, which I also ghosted, was Shattered by Mavis Marsh, whose son, Matthew, fell off a roof just as he was about to graduate from university and start a glittering career. After a year in a coma he defied the predictions of the medical profession and started to respond, although nothing in the family’s lives would ever be the same again.
Selling your story to a magazine
Many of the people who contact me about ghostwriting services have great stories to tell but they can be told in just a few thousand words, and they are probably not something that the reading public would be willing to pay for in isolation. There can, however, be a market for these stories in magazines and there are ghostwriters who actively seek them out.
The downside is that you don’t have much control over how the stories are presented. If the magazine editor decides to add a gruesome headline or picture, or wants to cut it to fit the magazine layout, there is little you can do about it. You will also only get paid a few hundred pounds (if you get paid at all). If none of these things strike fear into your heart, however, then it is one way of getting your story out there and might be a first step towards getting a full-scale book deal, although probably not.
Often when people approach me about the possibility of me ghosting for them, they will supply an article which has already been written about them. Zana and Nadia Muhsen, for instance, had had their story told initially by The Observer, and then picked up by every other newspaper. Those articles helped me to see the overall structure of the story which eventually grew to become Sold. In other cases, however, the fact that a story can be neatly summed up in 500 or a thousand words indicates that there may not be enough material to hold the reader’s attention for another 70,000 or more words.
Calls from out of the blue
These days most of my adventures start with an email, but in the mid-nineties they still arrived by telephone, and they could come from any time zone, night or day.
‘Mr Crofts,’ the distant voice asked as I picked up the phone, jerked painfully awake by its alarming ring, ‘do you like coming to the Far East?’
‘Yes,’ I replied, expecting to be told next that I should buy a time-share overlooking Pattaya beach.
‘I’m working for a very successful businessman,’ he continued, ‘in Kuala Lumpur. He is thinking of writing his autobiography.’
Once I had shaken my thoughts into place one thing led to another and a month or two later I found myself ensconced in a five star hotel in Kuala Lumpur, waiting to meet the founder and chief executive of one of Malaysia’s most successful banks. A private dining room had been booked and he swept into the lobby exactly on time, at the head of an entourage galloping to keep up. Over lunch he talked while we chewed on chickens’ feet, watched by the silently munching entourage around the circular table.
It was a good story. His father had come from China with nothing more than a rush mat rolled up under his arm, working on the rubber plantations as a coolie. The banker had started his working life as a child tapping rubber from high up on the trunks of the trees with flaming torches strapped to his head during the hours of darkness, frequently singeing his hair off.
Now he lived amongst all the trappings you would expect of one of the richest and most successful people in a city which was at the forefront of what was then being called the ‘Tiger Economy’. We got on well and he hired me for the job. It meant spending many hours with him in the city, but also travelling to the jungle village where he’d been born and brought up. He answered every question openly but I couldn’t help feeling that there was something else to the story that I wasn’t being told.
He was widely feted around town and found the attention mildly embarrassing. There was one particular dinner at a fancy hotel where the hosts insisted on ordering an expensive bottle of wine just for him, despite his protests, while the rest of the party drank something more modest.
‘I don’t like that,’ he muttered as we left at the end of the meal, ‘but what can you do? People want to do things for you.’
During the course of us writing the book the ‘Tiger Economy’ crashed. There were reports in the papers that the banker was now worth many billions of dollars less than he had been when I first met him, but I didn’t see any discernible change in his lifestyle.
After several trips to KL, I was getting close to finishing the book when he announced he was coming to London and invited me to his hotel in Grosvenor Square for lunch. I was shocked to be greeted by a man with only a few wisps of hair on his head where just a few weeks before he had sported a lustrous black mop.
‘At home I have to wear a wig,’ he explained when he saw my eyes flickering to the top of his head. ‘If word got out that I was ill it would affect the
business.’
‘You’re ill?’
With that announcement a number of things became clear, particularly the urgency with which he now wanted to see the project finished. The hair loss was due to chemotherapy and that lunch was the last time I saw him alive. The book was published in Singapore and was a fitting memorial to the man and his achievements. Without him there to promote it, however, it was never likely to reach an audience much wider than his friends, family and business associates.
I am an addict
I confess I am addicted to chasing possibilities for interesting new experiences.
They might be delivered in the form of a phone call out of the blue or, more often these days, as an email pinging into the inbox or a message through one of the social media sites. Then there are the voice mails (or answering machine messages as they once were), and the anxiety that comes from the terrible fear of missing some fascinating opportunity and the craving to be both distracted from that worry and reassured that I am still learning new things at a rate that will keep the addiction satisfied.
The seeds of a new story are usually unfamiliar and unexpected; on the phone it might be a foreign accent that is hard to understand (always promising), or the email might come from an unknown name at an unknown address and convey a cryptic enquiry without giving any further information. As long as there is something unknown in the offing there is a possibility of an adventure unfurling. It could be an invitation into a home or boardroom that I would otherwise be excluded from, an airline ticket to Bangkok or Haiti, New York or Rio, or just the promise of a story that will make my toes curl in anticipation.
Confessions of a Ghostwriter Page 8