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all about Belfast Books. It was the kind of publishing I detested. It survived on Arts Council grants and donations from charitable foundations. It was a producer of decaffeinated coffee table books masquerading as a beleaguered champion of culture. Under normal circumstances he wouldn't have given me the skin off his custard, but he was clearly after something. He didn't say it, but what he meant by 'some literature, a little poetry' was that nothing I sold in No Alibis would, in his mind, qualify as literature. That I was little more than a pimp for pulp fiction. That my life's work amounted to a wasted life. That I might as well never have existed.
    I hate judgemental people.
    I could have told him that we publish our own calendar every year. That it has twelve months and everything. That if he cared to flip back its pages he would become the beneficiary of a spiral-bound history of crime fiction in handy captions and meticulously reproduced classic covers: from arguably the very first roman policier (Emile Gaboriau's Le Crime d'Orcival) through the Yellow Back crime fighters (like Mary Paschal in Experiences of a Lady Detective in 1861). He would learn about twenty-year-old schoolteacher Edward Ellis who in the same decade sold 600,000 copies of Seth Jones, one of the first dime novels. He would become aware of the many rivals of Sherlock Holmes – Sexton Blake, Craig Kennedy, Martin Hewitt and Baroness Orczy's Skin O' My Tooth. He might learn the truth about Dashiell Hammett's Continental Op and his newspaper cartoon strip, 'Secret Agent X-9', or about Raymond Chandler calling Mickey Spillane's
I
, The Jury pulp writing at its worst even as it sold its four millionth copy; of James M. Cain's The Postman Always Rings Twice being seized by the Boston police for obscenity, of fantastic evocative noir titles like Lady – Here's Your Wreath, Kiss My Fist, Road Floozie, Night and the City, Now Try the Morgue, Murder Thy Neighbour . . . oh, I could have opened up a whole new world to him, but there was no point, his blinkers were firmly in place.
    'Okay,' I said, 'you're a publisher. We don't sell your type of books.'
    'It's not about the books,' he said, 'it's about your friend next door.'
    Ah.
    He wasn't the first to make this assumption, and he wouldn't be the last. But at that point he wasn't worthy of an explanation.
    'What about him?' I asked.
    'I paid, in advance, and now he's flown the coop. You have to tell me where he is.'
    'I have no idea where he is. And one should never pay for services in advance.'
    He fixed me with a look that was somewhere between anger and despair. 'I had to,' he finally admitted. 'I had to pay for his flight. I should have known then something was up. What sort of a state does a business have to be in that its owner can't afford a ticket to Frankfurt?'
    'Frankfurt?'
    I think it was at this exact point that I got sucked in. It was a classic honey trap. He hadn't even explained the case yet, but already the air was rich with intrigue and the possibility of international travel. He shook his head and sighed. I could see now that his face was deathly pale and the pulse on the side of his head was standing out like a varicose vein. He was obviously in turmoil. As it happened, at that very moment Jeff appeared through the door for his lunchtime shift – although I am constantly surprised to see him. I was frankly astonished that he accepted my argument that because I only get half as many customers in the summer months he should only receive fifty per cent of his normal pay. Still, it's a hundred per cent more than he gets working for that shower of whingers at Amnesty International, and at least with me he doesn't have to hold a placard or pretend that he understands Spanish. So I quickly instructed him to take over the desk, and to keep an eagle eye on the jewellery shop across the road, before escorting the Belfast Books publisher to the rear of the store, an open-plan area where I have