I have had a stalker, of the traditional variety. Many people have; unfortunately there is nothing remarkable about it. Mine was an ex-boyfriend, and I should say that when I met him he was not a predictable candidate for this role, although I suppose that’s true of many stalkers. After I broke up with him he would fill my phone every day - for about eighteen months - with messages, tracing a pattern that moved from scathing to enraged to contrite to desperate to unspeakably vicious (leaving a residual fear at that moment of pre-hearing, when one can sense that the phone is about to vibrate); and, on several occasions, obliged me to sit silent and frozen in the darkness while he knocked at the door and called at the windows of my flat.
I moved. I thought the ringing would eventually stop, but it continued. A friend, who had gone to a Newmarket race meeting that I usually attended, saw him skulking around - it was miles from where he was living and the thought that he had made the journey, on such a purpose, sent me finally to the police. ‘What have you done to annoy this bloke?’ said the officer, as he read a text that began ‘youre dead’. This was about fifteen years ago and I should like to think that the behaviour of officialdom has improved since then, but I wouldn’t bet on it.
The story is now over (a couple of people have suggested I should write about it, although it is, as I say, not remarkable), and this is really a post about something far less serious - although quite annoying. The literary stalker.
I don’t mean my ex’s habit - to which he freely admitted - of reviewing my books pseudonymously online, a variation on a theme that I’m sure has happened to pretty much every writer: the review from the ex, from the rival, from the person who thinks you stole their idea/job/boyfriend/nanny… My literary stalker was something less easily defined. Another person, a less malign version of my police officer, may well not have thought that he was a stalker at all.
We had met, through his partner but at his instigation, around the time that I published my book about Lord Lucan - a subject that fascinated him and that we discussed at extremely enjoyable length over dinners. I liked him, very much. He too wrote, and after a couple of meetings he told me that he was going to pitch a feature about Lucan. I’ll mention your book of course! Subsequently he told me, with a slight glee for which I did not entirely care, that he had emailed Lady Lucan to ask her what she thought of the book. He knew perfectly well that she would have hated it, I had spoken to everybody she most disliked. It crossed my mind briefly that he wanted a quote for his piece that would place my book in an unflattering light. Then I thought that was ridiculous, but I still considered his behaviour quite weird (how had he got her email? Why had he bothered?)
I can’t bear the picking over aspect of writing - reading reviews, reading other people’s reviews, comparing one’s reviews with other people’s reviews - or comments or likes or follower numbers or the rest of it… anything that hints at needling, intrusion, competitiveness (we are all competitive, but keep it under your hat). Why didn’t he just write his damn Lucan feature, I thought - why drag me into it? But I know that I am hyper-allergic to all this and I liked him enough to let it go. He wrote the piece, I didn’t read it (for the sake of sanity I confine most of my non-news-newspaper reading to the Racing Post) and that was that.
Until I started writing my book about the Thompson-Bywaters murder case, again chatting about it over dinner, and my friend suddenly told me that he had managed to visit the Black Museum at New Scotland Yard (not generally open to the public) and seen the knife used by Frederick Bywaters to kill Percy Thompson. Why did you do that, I asked. Well, he said, I’m interested in the case. I might pitch a feature about it. Do you want to know what the knife looked like? It’s huge, it’s terrifying! Of course I knew about the knife already, from photos and from reports of its dimensions, but I listened to the description of the physical object and tried to suppress an annoyance that I knew to be childish (knowing doesn’t help; the fact is that one can be childish at any age). Why shouldn’t he be interested in the case, I said to myself? For all I knew he had been interested for years.
And then came Agatha Christie, whose biographer I was, and about whom we had - yet again - talked quite a lot. My friend, as he still indubitably was, had bought tickets to an Agatha event in Devon. He offered me one. I quite fancied a couple of days on the coast, where a group of us planned to stay, so I went; in the course of the evening I introduced him to several people within the Christie organization, and the next thing I knew he was flourishing his new contacts and pitching a book about her.
Again, why shouldn’t he? What had he done wrong? I remember describing the situation at the time to another writer friend, saying that I found it all a bit unnerving and a bit of an effing cheek; getting in a bit of a temper, frankly, as I said what do you think, other friend, is this bloke trying to steal my career - ? and realizing, within the haze of rage and St-Véran, that I was the one who sounded weird. After all: I was hardly the first person to have written about Lucan/ Thompson-Bywaters/ Agatha, and it had never occurred to me that I would be the last… those subjects are simply too big, too dimensional, not to benefit from the interpretation of new commentators. Why, then, did I feel as though I had been literarily stalked?
I still feel it. I suppose my reasoning is this: that there is a vast difference between a writer covering a familiar subject because they have something to say about it, and one who parks their laptop on another writer’s lawn and seeks to shove them into the bins area. And a particular piece of work by my erstwhile friend, about which I shall remain entirely vague, did lead me to speak to a lawyer about possible plagiarism issues; but such things, drifting as they do in and out of the sphere of the subjective, are almost impossible to ‘prove’ - only the rich can start and win most such arguments.
Who knows? Either way, there is surely not much to be done about it. Although perhaps there is a book in it somewhere. Perhaps my erstwhile friend is writing it.
Not sure how gracious I was at the time... this is recollected in tranquility and all that...
Thanks for a lovely response. Much appreciated x
This is so easy to identify with for many women, sadly. (I have had a - fortunately - very short brush with that kind of thing.) The sense of impending threat is so hard to convey, unless one has gone through it. The police are really useless in such cases, and the attitude, My God!
But the latter part, the literary stalker of a garden variety, seemingly innocuous, is as alarming. A violation of one's literary output can be heartbreaking. It is easy for others to say: Publish and be damned!!! As a writer, one cannot be cavalier about such things.
My son, to whom I was recounting this story, came up with an interesting comment: "A literary stalker is like having a long shadow over one."
And he hasn't even watched the homonymous series.