The Other Conrad Williams…

Came to my attention painfully in late 90s.  My mental health doesn’t like to think about it.

I was still unpublished back then and working full time as a film/TV agent, repping scriptwriters.  I wrote my first novel across three years of evenings and weekends in the early Nineties, and sent it to publishers on the eve of my honeymoon. Responses were prompt and by the time I got back, the book had been shot out of the skies. My second book was written over 5 years, and this time it was clear: if I didn’t get this one away, I’d be a failure.

I was in my mid-to-late thirties when the tome went out to agents. Most of my literary friends were published by then, and we had seen one new impostor after another take wing at the agency.  It seemed that - for some - getting published was easy as pie.

That second book didn’t land an agent, and there began an 18 month period of fraught reckoning.  I was in last chance saloon, balls absolutely against the wall. My conception of myself as an author had a revolver to its head. Not that anybody else gave a damn; the sufferings of writers are a matter of jocular indifference and scented Schadenfreude to others. I was looking forward to enjoying the adage: ‘It is not enough to succeed, others must fail,’ but was in danger of delivering on the wrong side of that pithy little headshot.

It was around this time that I was commuting into work one morning and saw ‘HEAD INJURIES by Conrad Williams’ in poster adverts all over the Underground. The sense of chagrin was instant and immolating, and I remember the holed-beneath-the-water-line feeling as I stood on the platform, the sense of being fortune’s patsy and catamite.  Not only had I not got published, somebody called Conrad Williams had. We writers pride ourselves on having something unique to offer. I no longer had my name, and although I knew this was not unprecedented, I felt withered and ghosted, just not there.

Worse was to come.  I staggered into the office, reached for the to-do list: the in-tray brimming with the demands of clients, the petty admin, the ghastly contractual small-print, the sea of neediness, the sheer mediocrity of it, everywhere, limitless, and then the phone started ringing.

Friends.

Joyous, cheering, jubilant friends. They were so happy.  I had done it.  I had stuck to my guns, strained every sinew, won the prize. Half of London had seen the posters and thought the other Conrad was me. ‘We had our doubts’, said one, ‘reckoned you might have been a bit of a duffer, but you’ve proven us wrong. Well done, mate. You’re a star.’

You can imagine their disappointment when I told them in a soft low broken voice that it wasn’t me.  It was…another…Conrad Williams. The groans of dismay were awful to hear. My humiliation was like a softening of the ego into shit.

It did seem back then that I was being tested by malign fates and made to suffer so much more than other writers in some Christ-like preparation for my final redemption. I later got an agent for book two and had to go through the misery of fifteen publisher rejections before the evil spell broke. Eventually I hired an editor and she told me to cut the first 65 pages and start the book right by the amputation scar. With her help I repositioned the exposition deeper in the story and suddenly we had a proposition that was beginning to throb with life.

It went to auction and was eventually published as a lead title by Bloomsbury.

 SEX & GENIUS by Conrad Williams.

During this difficult frazzling time I hadn’t dared to pick up HEAD INJURIES, but in the early meetings with Bloomsbury I suggested I ought to change my name.  I favoured ‘Conrad Renaissance’, which had a certain je ne sais quoi. But the ladies at Bloomsbury, those vestals to literature with their ravishing coils of Pre-Raphaelite hair, wouldn’t hear of it. They really liked my name. Who is this other Conrad Williams, they said?  We’ve never heard of him, they pleaded. It was difficult not to be flattered by their protestations and I thought, OK, I’ve got my identity back.  It does make things easier to be who you are, and keeping my name had one big advantage. It would be a blunt two fingers to all the nay-sayers who thought I couldn’t cut it. 

I’m glad to say that from then on, the existence of the other Conrad Williams stopped bothering me. I did dip in to one of his books, and it looked pretty good. The guy could certainly write.  I saw some top reviews. It seemed to me that he did honour to the name and that we were both rather brilliant writers (if we say so ourselves, and I’m sure he’s not going to disagree) and that as long as I wasn’t letting him down, and he wasn’t letting me down, it was OK.  Our readerships were bound to be different, and if one or two accidentally strayed my way and read ‘The Concert Pianist’ expecting a horror novel, I would get an extra sale. A few pages of Wigmore Hall ambience would permeate the reader’s mind before he realised there were no amputations, body parts or screaming skulls, and what the fuck was Conrad doing?

So gradually it became irrelevant and I came to like the idea of my parallel namesake out there, playing the same long game, book after book, joined to the same creative task, dealing with the same cycle, albeit more prolifically than me. We were in it together. His author photo and mine handsomely defended our joint patch on Google images, going toe to toe with the athlete Conrad Williams who was all over bloody everything. I liked his surly visage, the face of an author who has gazed deep into the human condition and needs to spit out the aftertaste. His book covers became companionable siblings to my titles online.  I knew that if I ever met him, we’d have a good laugh and a good pint.

There was one late and priceless humiliation that helped to make me the man I now am.

I had been involved in a series of amateur celebrity piano concerts hosted by the concert pianist Lucy Parham at King’s Place. Various fabled amateur maestros ranging from Alan Rusbridger to Ed Balls, Anneka Rice and Alistair McGowan, and yours truly, played easy classical pieces to a paying audience as a pre-Xmas charity gig. We were wittily compered by Sean Rafferty and the whole thing was terrific adrenalin-rush laced with hilarity. I was a non-celebrity of course, only there because of my ‘Concert Pianist’ book, but one of these concerts roughly coincided with the publication of UNFINISHED BUSINESS, my third.  There was an opportunity to get an puff from Sean Rafferty in the onstage interview and as we sat in the greenroom I told him ‘be a mate and mention my book’. Sean jotted in his note book and agreed to tell the audience before I played.

The only problem was that when Sean went online to mug up about me, he hit the other Conrad, mastered that brief, and then when I arrived nervously on stage and stood before a packed audience, introduced me as the brilliant and prolific author of ten horror novels, ‘Ladies and gentleman, I give you horror writer extraordinaire, the one, the only…

Conrad Williams