Plume. Will Wiles
game, to take on the role of the indifferent bystander, the grazing TV viewer, the desensitised inquisitor, the impatient and unsympathetic bureaucracy. The reader’s natural frustration with a long and frankly exhausting experimental novel was thus subverted. Read to the end or put the book down unfinished – either way, Pierce won. Reviewers were divided. One-third of them hailed Pierce as a genius, another third called him a charlatan. The remainder made it obvious they did not understand the book, and maybe had not even finished it, by playing it safe with cautious praise.
After the modest success of Mile End Road, Faber had poached Pierce from Panhandler and put out Murder Boards with much ballyhoo, but despite a brief life as an edgy fashion accessory and social media prop, it was a resounding commercial failure. Whatever happened, Pierce was back at Panhandler for his third book, Night Traffic. Maybe the big house took fright at the thought of releasing a long essay covering many of the same themes as the chunky, expensive literary novel that was stinking up its balance sheets.
But since the appearance of Murder Boards, Pierce had acquired a small and eager following, myself included. His post-riots essay for 3AM Magazine, ‘Beneath the Paving Stones, the Fire’, had circulated on Twitter and Tumblr for more than a month, and was republished by the New York Times. Pierce had been writing essays about London for years, but now his writing became more adventurous, more scandalous, and funnier. He was able to arrange gonzo escapades that other journalists – again, myself included – could only dream about. A night spent with criminal fly-tippers, dumping trash on street corners and narrowly evading the police. Searching for forgotten IRA arms caches in north London back gardens. A memorably hilarious excursion with three Russian heiresses, the daughters of Knightsbridge-resident oligarchs, to find and consume authentic East End jellied eels.
In the summer of 2012 – the ‘Olympic summer’, we journalists are now apparently bound by law to call it, although for me personally it has darker connotations – Night Traffic appeared. Short, extraordinary, explosive. Night Traffic was an account of an incident the previous year in which Pierce had been mugged by a group of youths, no more than teenagers, in a quiet part of his native east London. Finding Pierce’s mobile phone and about £20 in cash to be insufficient reward for their effort, the youths had shown the author a blade, marched him to a cashpoint and forced him to withdraw £300. He spent more than half an hour in their company, crashing through an immense range of emotions from outright terror to perverse bonhomie and back to terror. Afterwards he had been too traumatised to appreciate that he should report what had happened to the police. A dark week was spent shut up in his flat, turning the events of that night over and over in his head, before he realised that he did not want to report it after all. Instead he would compose his own report, tackle the matter as a writer, as a journalist. He returned to the scene during the day and at night, and retraced his steps. He tried to find witnesses. He searched for the youths, sitting out through the small hours. He tried to get CCTV footage of the incident, without success. And he found himself coming to a transgressive acceptance of what had happened: that his ordeal had been a natural part of the ecology of the city and the economy of the night, that it was all preordained and the product of order, not disorder – and, most controversially, that violence might be a salutary urban force, ‘the street seeking balance’.
Night Traffic was not quite an ‘Overnight Success’, as the headline of Pierce’s Guardian interview put it. Panhandler was a small operation, based in Ipswich, and only managed to get it into a few larger bookshops. But Pierce’s cult reputation got it under all the right noses, and even before its official publication there were rumours and previews promising that it was special. Then came a month-long bombardment of long, shining pieces by heavy-hitters: Will Self in the Guardian, Geoff Dyer in the Telegraph, Michael Moorcock in the Independent, Rebecca Solnit in the TLS, Iain Sinclair in the LRB. Panhandler’s first printing sold out immediately and it rushed a deal with Faber for a mass-market paperback, which hit every bookshop in the UK and Ireland just as the award shortlists started to roll in. Knopf bought US rights for six figures. By early 2013, Pierce was a rare creature: a literary celebrity. He even made a brief, ill-at-ease appearance on The One Show, during which, in a first for that programme, he used the word ‘epiphenomenal’.
Then he disappeared, or as close to ‘disappeared’ as you can get while still living in London and being verifiably alive. The last post he made on Twitter was to announce the cancellation of two forthcoming events; the account shut down a couple of weeks later. Emails bounced back to their senders. The slim hardback of collected essays came out in late 2013 and Pierce did nothing to promote it – no interviews, no readings, no appearances.
Night Traffic had attracted some controversy. The police had helped sales by criticising Pierce’s decision not to report the crime, and his freelance investigations. A Daily Mail columnist had attacked Pierce for ‘celebrating’ urban violence. One or two bloggers had taken against the book, claiming that it perpetuated stereotypes about the inner cities and deprived young people, although there was never much wind in the sails of this accusation; some corners of Twitter griped about ‘poverty tourism’. But the reasons for Pierce’s withdrawal from view remained stubbornly enigmatic. One theory was that he had taken fright at the sudden attention; another held that it was all a ploy, a stunt, an over-exposed author’s effort to recharge mystique. There were rumours of grand secret projects, but nothing more than rumours. I had been astonished when F.A.Q. said Pierce had been consulting with them on the mapping software that underpinned Tamesis. Consulting how? Doing what? Tamesis’s workings were obscure, purposefully so – Quin had this whole spiel about concealing some aspects of how the application worked. ‘Open but dark systems’, ‘benevolent spookiness’, ‘network chiaroscuro’. You can see all that on Quin’s TED Talk, or his presentation to the RSA. I forget which.
But I digress.
Writing profiles isn’t hard – there are rules to remember, but anyone can learn those rules. For instance, don’t slam your readers with great slabs of biography. Don’t regurgitate the subject’s CV all over the page. That information needs to be broken into digestible morsels and stirred into the writing. I learned that in my first job in journalism, shortly after I graduated in 2004. See?
Another rule is: don’t keep the reader hanging around. Like Eddie said, listen out for that strong opening. You have to start with a bang. The beauty of this is that even a disastrous interview with an obstructive subject can be turned to your advantage. If Pierce was rude and unhelpful, if he refused to answer questions and insulted my parents, I could still write the piece to my advantage – as a gonzo exercise, to use Pierce’s own tactics against him, or as self-deprecating humour. It took a bit of skill, but it was possible. I had started the calamitous Quin interview with his reaction to my late arrival. Indeed, it was a gambit I had worked hard in recent months as my preparation had grown more and more threadbare, and anyway it was so heavily used in the Sundays it has become cliché.
Yet another rule – and this applies to all feature writing, not just profiles – is that you need what’s called a ‘nut graf’. This is a paragraph or a line, near the start of the piece, that tells the reader what the article is about. It poses the question that the feature sets out to answer. So for Pierce, I’d like the nut graf to be along these lines: What made this acclaimed author suddenly shut himself off from the world – and why is he opening up now?
To ask that, of course, I’d need to get a good answer to that question. Because I have a nut graf of my own: Am I going to be fired this week?
At Victoria Station, there were unusually large numbers of people standing on the forecourt, not rushing about, and for a horrible second I thought the Underground entrances might be closed. This often happens in the mornings, as Victoria is always overcrowded and they have to shut the gates to stop a dangerous crush developing on the platforms. But it was well past the peak of rush hour and people were freely coming and going. Those commuters who were standing around outside were all facing in the same direction, towards Victoria Street, and they were all looking up at the sky.
I had been walking with my head down and my earphones in, thinking about Pierce, about what I was going to ask him. Little else had registered, apart from the coldness