Deviation and double entendre

If there’s anything full-time novelists hate more than a celebrity muscling in on their turf, it’s the celebrity doing such a good job that it seems as if anybody could write fiction. Happily for the pros, this isn’t a problem with Briefs Encountered. Not only is the book full of obvious flaws, but it also makes the whole business of novel-writing look unbelievably difficult. There is, it turns out, so much to do — what with plot, characters, dialogue and tone all to be created and, worse still, made coherent. And then there’s all those pesky sentences you have to string together…

In fact, Clary’s set-up is quite promising. Richard Stent, a middle-aged actor, his once-stellar career in gentle decline, moves with his boyfriend to Goldenhurst, a house in Kent that he buys from a dissolute comedian called Julian Clary. More significantly, between 1926 and 1956, Goldenhurst was the home of Noël Coward.