One of those intermittent publishing fusses over a talked-up book by an unknown author occurred last autumn, when a debut novel by Nicholas Searle called A Reckoning was lucratively sold in the UK and US after a fight for the rights. Searle offers the media an enticing short-term backstory – as a retiree who developed the novel at a writing school set up by the literary agents Curtis Brown – and, going further back in time, an even more tantalising CV. He studied at a German university and, his author biography notes, “is not allowed to say more about his career than that he was a senior civil servant for many years” – a formulation that those familiar with the dustjacket subterfuges of certain spies-turned-writers will find a little … well, spooky.
And John le Carré, it turns out, is one of the biggest tutelary influences (along with Patricia Highsmith and Ruth Rendell) on a novel that, in the gap between sale and publication, has changed its name to The Good Liar, although its enjoyable momentum still leads towards a reckoning.
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