The Death List Read Free Page A

sensitive child.
    Never mind, Matt, WD had said. You have so much talent that I know you’ll be back in print soon. James Lee Burke went unpublished for years. And look at Brian Wilson. Decades of silence and then a great new album. He was trying to help, but he didn’t succeed. I didn’t have five percent of Burke’s talent and, besides, I’d never liked the Beach Boys’ warblings.
    Normally authors who have been dropped by their publishers do their best to keep that fact from their readers. Not me. In what my ex-wife described as “a career-terminating act that Kurt Cobain would have been proud of,” I decided to air my grievances in the columns of a broadsheet newspaper. I’d met the literary editor at a party and I thought he’d be interested in an insightful piece on the cutthroat nature of the modern publishing business. He was, but not for the reasons I’d assumed. I bitched about how much money my publishers had invested in me only to cut their losses before I made the big time, I whined about how the author’s appearance was more important than a skilled turn of phrase, and I looked back nostalgically to the weeks I’d spent on the road chatting up booksellers—all thrown away at the whim of a callous managing director. Controversy flowed for almost a week, and then the literary world moved on to more pressing issues (the next bald footballer’s ghosted biography, the kiss-and-tell story of a large-bosomed singer). And, too late, I realized that, by deploying my cannon as loosely as a blind-drunk pirate captain, I’d made myself unpublishable. Smart move. It got worse. A few days later my agent, a rapacious old dandy called Christian Fels, sent me an e-mail in which he graciously relinquished his representation of me. I had hit rock bottom. No publisher, no agent, no income.
    At least WD remained supportive. Loved your piece in the paper, Matt. Such a shame the people running publishing are so shortsighted. So what if so-called experts like Dr. Lizzie Everhead tear you to shreds in public. Don’t lose heart. There’s a story out there waiting for you to write! Typical nonwriter, I thought. Stories didn’t hang around like pythons waiting to ambush passing writers. Stories were in writers’ heads, hidden away like lodes of precious metal. You had to dig deep and hard to find them, and I wasn’t up to that anymore. I was too dispirited, too cynical, too ground down. I could have done without being reminded of Lizzie Everhead, as well. She was a poisonous academic who’d taken exception to my use of the Jacobean setting in the Tertius books. She and Alexander Drys were my biggest hate-objects.
    Then I clicked open WD’s latest message and entered a world of pain and torment.
     
    Something I’d noticed as I scrolled down the messages in WD’s file was that the e-mail address was always different. I’d been aware of that before, but I hadn’t paid much attention, assuming my correspondent was the kind of cheapskate who jumped from Microsoft to Google to Yahoo, setting up free accounts and giving himself all sorts of different identities for fun. Except WD was always WD, no matter what his e-mail server was. This time he was [email protected].
    Dear Matt, I read. Hope you’re well. I’ve made the most interesting discovery. You haven’t been honest with me! There I was thinking that your name was Matt Stone and now I find that you’re actually called Matt Wells.
    That was interesting. I’d never revealed my real name anywhere on my site or in the media. I was a music journalist before I started writing novels, and I wanted to keep my two professions separate. I had the feeling that people who read my interviews with the Pixies and my career assessments of Neil Young and Bob Dylan might not be too impressed by the fact that I also wrote crime novels. I should have realized that being embarrassed about what I did was a bad sign. But the point was, how the hell had WD uncovered my real