Shortly after the writer Martin Amis died on 19th May, 2023, I wrote the following. Amidst a flurry of eulogistic obituaries in all manner of media outlets, it struck me as a little cheap, so I left it to moulder in the ‘file pending’ WordPress drawer. He died in Florida, aged 73, of oesophageal cancer, which is – I’m sure – every bit as unpleasant as it sounds. What became emphatically clear in the days and weeks that followed was just how revered he was as a master of his craft.

I owe Mr Amis a lot. The single biggest pay rise I ever received in one go, for a start. My reputational lift, albeit by association and in the smallish allotment of British advertising in 1990, was also very largely his fault. We never actually met each other, and he wouldn’t have had a clue who I was. Hardly his loss.

At Bartle Bogle Hegarty, Alison Butler arrived from Paddington’s BMP as an account director. Persistent and focused, she did a great job. She landed – and took firm control of – a boutique client, unlikely to make the agency any money but a good-to-have name on the list: publishing house Jonathan Cape. BBH’s celebratory approach to pitching demanded that clients dock without seeing any creative work specific to their businesses. The first that Martin and I knew about it was when we were briefed to come up with something to publicise a book.

The new-ish marketing person at Cape was a man called David Godwin. He had already caused flutters through the publishing world, with a swashbuckling attitude towards propelling titles towards the public. In 1989, he decided to throw the entire annual publicity budget of £25,000 at one title, and one title only.

The book was Martin Amis’ London Fields. It hadn’t been printed when he decided to put the whole sum on that one imprint.

Martin and I were handed a heavy, photocopied draft typed out in double spacing. Across almost every page were Amis’ handwritten corrections, alterations and revisions to his own prose. We were given a unique snapshot of his pursuit of the extreme. In tiny, livid, black ink, he neatly crossed out “gold” as a description of a type of credit card, and we watched it become – eventually – “plutonium” as he tried a succession of descriptors, before settling on the nuclear adjective. It was an object lesson in the poacher-turned-gamekeeper art of self editing. He was a master. There were countless other examples, as he pushed his characters, particularly those of Keith Talent and Nicola Six, to queasy excess with scalpel precision. It is an enduring regret that I no longer have that scrappy, dog-eared draft.

The press advertisement that appeared was very much Martin Galton’s inspiration. Together we tinkered with the wording, fact checking with all and sundry through reputable channels. Its appearance caused quite a stir. Auberon Waugh began a very public feud with Amis through the pages of the Evening Standard. Other commentators expressed varying levels of outrage. The book sold well. Honestly, it being an eagerly anticipated Martin Amis novel, I’m pretty sure it would have done so anyway. David Godwin cemented his place (as something of a Marmite presence) in the publishing world, attracting praise and opprobrium for his assertive behaviour.

There are those who insist that ‘Money’ or ‘Success‘ were Amis’ greatest works. Other circle round the later books. I’m certainly no expert, nor a thoroughly read or referenced critic, but having loved the addictive, acrobatic and adventurousness qualities of his writing from the The Rachel Papers onwards, I thought I’d slide this little tip of the hat out there now, if only to prove this largely dormant blog is just resting, and not dead. And, to state the bleeding obvious, how deftly could Amis have continued to skewer the bizarre, and often horrific, nature of culture in 2024 were he still with us.