Andrew Harold Morton

Ludlow is a perfectly good name for a small English town on the borders of Wales and England. It is a picturesque hill top settlement with a castle, some authentic looking 16th century architecture and an antique shop or two. My wife and I go there when we are free of work and domestic duties, and patronise a time-locked tearoom straight out of "Withnail and I". As a Christian name, Ludlow is unusual but it is one of those limited number of place names that people get named after, like Stratford and Sterling and Kent.

One day, when I was beginning to try my hand at short stories, about three years ago, I had a memorable phone call, or, at least, it became so for me.

"Is that Ludlow?" asked the person on the other end of the line, in a high mincing Brummie accent.

"No", I replied, rather stupidly, "It's Birmingham."

"I mean," persisted the voice, "Is that Ludlow? Ludlow Spiers?"

"Sorry, wrong number."

But when I put the phone down, the name had made an impression and I filed it away in my list of interesting names, which I suppose most would-be writers keep somewhere.

It was in an Internet chat-room, a few days later, that I was first tempted to give the name an outing. Andrew Morton is a perfectly good name, I suppose, but it has one major drawback: I share it another writer who specialises in writing biographies of celebrities like Priness Di and Posh Spice. The jibes are inevitable and you can waste a fair amount of time parrying them.

My first outing with Ludlow Spiers was rather pleasurable. I had never used a pseudonym before, and I found the game slightly exhilarating, like wearing a borrowed Fedora hat. The name had a kind of transparent nom-de-plume quality about it, tastelessly stylish like a 50's Bakelite radio. Alternatively, it could have been a upper-class roué character part for George Sanders in a 1940's film. It could also pass for a writer's name, probably a writer of well-crafted genre fiction, and I was happy to sign in several times as Ludlow and savour the reactions it evoked from total strangers.

It happened a little later that I was working on a story called Lost in the Stars, and, looking for a name for a pretentious, but highly successful conceptual artist whose work no one understood except our semi-insane protagonist. Ludlow Spiers seemed to fit the bill and I tried it out. It worked. This time, the name took on a different quality. This Spiers was a con-man, a pseud specialising in mystification, but a sharp operator who knew how to take the art world for a ride. He was only a small part of the story, but his appearance served to clarify something about the mysterious first person narrator, who had the measure of him. This was a story in which I invested a lot of myself in my narrator, so I found myself adopting an attitude towards the name and the sort of human being it stood for. He became my natural antagonist.

This is where it gets personal. I suppose that like most of us involved in this writing game, I do other things as well to keep the wolf from the door. For a start, I teach and have been teaching English for the last twenty-five years, an occupation in which I have reached my modest natural ceiling as deputy head of department. I also write music for TV documentaries, as well as music for the stage and songs in their own right, some of which, my friends assure me, are classics in their own way. I have nothing to complain about - this constitutes a full and satisfying working life, even more full when you count the blessings of a family and everything that entails. Nevertheless, all this graft, which I love, and do not resent in the slightest, leaves me on the wrong side of worldly success. I spread myself too thinly - I know that - but it's still somehow galling that there are people out there who seem to have achieved wealth and recognition in an apparently effortless fashion.

They are the canny ones who see a gap and exploit it in true market fashion. Sometimes they exploit some limited talent in a totally single-minded way, like my namesake, who writes banal biographies of celebrities. Sometimes there is an element of charlatanry in their work, like the writing or business gurus who charge large fees to teach the secret of formularised success or the TV critics who pontificate on late night chat programmes. For me, these people who sail by blithely on the good ship Wealth and Recognition are all Ludlow Spiers. They excite in me a mixture of envy and resentment and I know several of them in real life. If you really pushed them about the nature of their success, they would ultimately claim that they were only where they deserved to be, but like Hamlet, I grow sceptical about the concept of deserts, and have learnt to look on the world as a far more random place built more clearly on chance than deserving.

For me, writing is only marginally a paying proposition. Consequently I allow myself the luxury of playing games with my fiction, like including myself somewhere in a walk-on role in most stories. It's fun and only a very few people notice. I am also in the process of exploring my own attitudes and preoccupations and, in several stories, there is a role somewhere for Ludlow Spiers. He is always minor, perhaps just mentioned as a name, but he is always there in my consciousness and emblematic of something alien, disturbing. In my story The Real McKay, he appears in his true role as pseudonym for the writer of a new- gangster movie called "Die, You Bastard." His work is held up as an example to the aspiring screenwriter. In The Merrivale Incident, another of my stories, he is the director of the action movie the morons are watching on TV as their father burns to a cinder in the garden shed.

They say that names, like song titles, are among the few things you can't copyright, although I would not like to try this out with Mary Poppins or Harry Potter. But Ludlow disturbs me. I think it's extremely unlikely that the real Ludlow Spiers will phone me up one day and demand an explanation. Whoever he is, I suspect he is not an aficionado of obscure short fiction on the Internet. There are two L. Spierses in the Birmingham phone book, and one of them has a number that is only one digit away from mine, which explains the initial wrong number. It's not this that disturbs me, but the possibility that underneath it all, I have a sneaking admiration for Ludlow. He also holds up a mirror in which I see the ugly face of envy staring back at me. In the same way that he haunts several of my stories in a marginal way, he haunts me too as a disturbing ectoplasmic projection of myself. He's a kind of "what if" presence who strolls along beside me in a parallel universe where people live off their royalties and don't need to work. Ludlow doesn't need to prove anything, because he is the personification of "success", whatever that is. He knows the secret that has always proved, and will always prove elusive to me in a worldly sense, but I also know that if I talked to him, whatever advice he could give would not make sense. I don't like him, but I envy him his ability to live with ease without breaking himself on the grindstone of work.

However, I have never thought of Ludlow as being happy or even particularly human. He has the kind of narrow, foxy face that people distrust. He probably has that shifty look of the rich about him, always suspicious that someone is going to try and touch him for a few quid. His relationships have never added up to much, and now, in his fifties, the prospect of old age is beginning to look bleak and lonely. He lives in a manor house in the Cotswolds surrounded by a high security fence. He never goes down the pub. He is also a mild obsession, and perhaps that's what it's all about really, our delight as writers in teasing out the magic from words or names and making them a part of our own and our readers' universes.

THE DISTURBING CASE OF LUDLOW SPIERS - LITERARY ECTOPLASM

by

THE DISTURBING CASE OF LUDLOW SPIERS -
LITERARY ECTOPLASM