In a pleasant but modest one-and-a-half-bedroom flat in Crouch End, the half bedroom-cum-boxroom boasts a bookshelf that indicates eclectic taste on the part of its owner. Amongst its dozen or so volumes are a score-settling memoir by a disgraced royal lady-in-waiting, petulantly entitled I Also Served, You Know; a revisionist history of WWII written by a television weatherman, called I Wish We Were German; and, most remarkably, a collection of homoerotic sonnets in the Petrarchan style that were privately printed at the behest of the former global finance director at Goldman Sachs.
The only giveaway as to the true creator of these works is the existence of two incongruous-looking books, tucked away at the end of the shelf. The first is a dual biography of Philip Larkin and Andrew Marvell, proudly entitled Hull Raisers, and the second is a squat title that proclaims itself to be The Key to All Mythologies, in a nod to the desiccated pedant Casaubon from Middlemarch. Both were written under the real name of the creator of the volumes on the bookshelf, Rupert Singer, and failed to set the publishing world alight. Hull Raisers at least received faint encouragement in the Literary Review (‘a decent stab at poetic resurrection’) but The Key to All Mythologies sold precisely 74 copies in its first six months on sale, mainly to academic libraries, and was pulped before the year was out.
