Martin had never done anything like that in his life before. He didn’t even kill flies in the house, instead he patiently stalked them, trapping them with a glass and a plate before letting them free. The meek shall inherit the earth. He was fifty and had never knowingly committed an act of violence against another living creature, although sometimes he thought that might have more to do with cowardice than pacifism.

He had stood in the queue, waiting for someone else to intervene in the scene unfolding before them, but the crowd was in audience mode, like promenaders at a particularly brutal piece of theater, and they had no intention of spoiling the entertainment. Even Martin had wondered at first if it was another show-a faux-impromptu piece intended either to shock or to reveal our immunity to being shocked because we lived in a global media community where we had become passive voyeurs of violence (and so on). That was the line of thought running through the detached, intellectual part of his brain. His primitive brain, on the other hand, was thinking, Oh fuck, this is horrible, really horrible, please make the bad man go away. He wasn’t surprised to hear his father’s voice in his head (“Pull yourself together, Martin”). His father had been dead for many years, but Martin often still heard the bellow and yell of his parade-ground tones. When the Honda driver finished breaking the windows of the silver Peugeot and walked toward the driver, brandishing his weapon and preparing himself for a final victory blow, Martin realized that the man on the ground was probably going to die, was probably going to be killed by the crazed man with the bat, right there in front of them, unless someone did something, and, instinctively, without thinking about it at all-because if he’d thought about it he might not have done it-he slipped his bag off his shoulder and swung it, hammer-throw fashion, at the head of the insane Honda driver.

He missed the man’s head, which didn’t surprise him, he’d never been able to aim or catch, he was the kind of person who ducked when a ball was thrown in his direction, but his laptop was in the bag and the hard weighty edge of it caught the Honda driver on the shoulder and sent him spinning.

The nearest Martin had been to a real crime scene previously had been on a Society of Authors’ trip around St. Leonard’s Police Station. Apart from Martin, the group consisted entirely of women. “You’re our token man,” one of them said to him, and he sensed a certain disappointment in the polite laughter of the others, as if the least he could have done as their token man was be a little less like a woman.

They had been offered coffee and biscuits-chocolate bourbons, pink-wafer sandwiches; they had all been impressed by the assortment-and a “senior policeman” had given a pleasant talk in a new conference room that felt as if it had been specially designed for groups such as theirs. Then they were shown round various parts of the building, the call center and the cavernous space of a room where people in plain clothes (NCIS) who were sitting at the computers glanced briefly at the “authors,” decided, correctly, that they were irrelevant, and returned to their screens.

They had all stood in a lineup, one of their members had her fingerprints taken, and then they were locked-briefly-in a cell, where they had shuffled and giggled to take the edge off the claustrophobia. The word “giggle,” it struck Martin, was an almost exclusively female verb. Women giggle, men simply laugh. Martin worried that he was a bit of a giggler himself. At the end of the tour, as if it had been staged for their benefit, they witnessed, with a little frisson of fear, a team being hastily assembled in riot gear to remove a “difficult” prisoner from a cell.

The tour hadn’t had much relevance to the kind of books that Martin wrote, in the person of his alter ego Alex Blake.They were old-fashioned, soft-boiled crime novels featuring a heroine named Nina Riley, a gung ho kind of girl who had inherited a detective agency from her uncle. The books were set in the forties, just after the war. It was an era in history that Martin felt particularly drawn to, the monochrome deprivation of it, the undertow of seedy disappointment in the wake of heroism. The Vienna of The Third Man, the Home Counties of Brief Encounter.What must it have felt like to have pinned your colors to the standard of a just war, to have experienced so many noble feelings (yes, a lot of propaganda, but the kernel of it was true), to have been released from the burden of individualism? To have stood on the edge of destruction and defeat and come through. And thought, Now what? Of course, Nina Riley didn’t feel any of those things, she was only twenty-two and had seen out the war in a Swiss finishing school. And she wasn’t real.

Nina Riley had always been a tomboy, though she had no apparent lesbian tendencies and was constantly courted by a great variety of men, with whom she was remarkably chaste. (“It’s as if,” an “appreciative reader”wrote to him,“a Chalet School head girl grew up and became a detective.”) She lived in a geographically vague version of Scotland that contained sea and mountains and rolling moorland, all within a fast drive of every major town in Scotland (and, frequently, England, although never Wales, something Martin thought he should perhaps rectify) in Nina Riley’s racy, open-top Bristol. When he wrote the first Nina Riley book, he had conceived it as an affectionate nod in the direction of an earlier time and an earlier form. “A pastiche, if you will,” he said nervously, when he was introduced to his editor at the publishing house. “A kind of ironic homage.” It had been a surprise to find that he was being published. He had written the book to entertain himself and suddenly he was sitting in a featureless London office feeling he had to justify the nonsense he had created to a young woman who seemed to find it difficult to keep her mind on him.

“Be that as it may,” she said, making a visible effort to look at him, “what I see is a book I can sell. A sort of jolly murder mystery. People crave nostalgia, the past is like a drug. How many books do you envisage in the series?”

“Series?”

“Hi.”

Martin turned round and saw a man leaning against the doorjamb in an attitude of studied casualness. He was older than Martin but dressed younger.

“Hi,” the young editor said in return, giving the man her rapt attention. Their minimal exchange seemed to carry almost more meaning than it could bear. “Neil Winters, our MD,”she said with a proud smile. “This is Martin Canning, Neil. He’s written a wonderful book.”

“Fantastic,” Neil Winters said, shaking Martin’s hand. His hand was damp and soft and made Martin think of something dead you might pick up on the beach. “The first of many, I hope,” Neil Winters said.

Within a couple weeks Neil Winters was transported into more elevated echelons in the European mother ship and Martin never saw him again, but nevertheless he saw that handshake as the identifiable moment when his life changed.

Martin had recently sold the television rights for the Nina Riley books. “Like getting into a warm bath. Perfect fodder for the Sunday evening slot,” the BBC producer said, making it sound like an insult, which, of course, it was.

In the two-dimensional fictional world that she inhabited, Nina Riley had so far solved three murders, a jewel theft, and a bank robbery; retrieved a stolen racehorse; prevented the kidnapping of the infant Prince Charles from Balmoral; and, on her sixth outing, foiled a plot (almost single-handedly) to steal the Scottish crown jewels. The seventh, The Monkey Puzzle Tree, was currently new in paperback and was featured on the “Three for Two”tables in every bookshop. The seventh was “darker,” everyone seemed to agree (“Blake is finally moving toward a more mature noir style,” “a reader” had written on Amazon. Everyone’s a critic), but despite this, his sales remained “buoyant,” according to his agent, Melanie. “No end in sight yet, Martin,” she said. Melanie was Irish, and this made everything she said sound nice even when it wasn’t.