Dave B.

          Dave didn't believe in having information about himself on the web, but I thought if I was going to start up this writing business again, I should start by saying something about agents, and Dave was my agent up until he passed away just over six weeks ago.

          I signed a literary agent contract with Dave three years ago now. This was maybe six months after he'd been handed the black spot and he wasn't expecting to live more than another year or so. Because he was no longer working, he asked to read The Buddha and the Big Bad Wolf and liked it so much that he asked me if he could send it off to a publisher who had just started up in Glasgow at the time. Although I had an agent then (a proper literary agent!), I said alright and Dave and I thought we'd sold these Glasgow folk the book. £750 and 16% off sales is what we shook on. Since my agent had failed for three or four years to sell anything despite his best efforts, I signed a contract with Dave. Of course, the Glasgow boys were never heard of again. And Dave didn't know anything about being a literary agent. That didn't really matter since signing the contract with Dave wasn't really a business decision.

           I'd known Dave since about 1972. Most of the folk I met at Edinburgh University were the usual progeny of the evil bourgeois; arrogant, venal, snidey basturns, making their little fuss at uni before growing up to become local government agents of some kind or another. But Dave was a very nice person. In fact, I don't think I've known a nicer person. I never saw Dave angry, or even being judgemental about folk. And he wasn't greedy. Just an extremely helpful, nice, iintelligent, clever and positive guy.

          Nobody else I know would have wanted to help me get books published  You have to have great generosity of spirit. Most people want other people to fail. It's really because of Dave that I'm writing this blog in more ways than one. It was because of Dave that my ten books are on Kindle. Dave put most of them there and helped with the proof reading.

          Anyway, I haven't got an agent any more.  It looks as if looking for an agent is what I should be doing to get back into this writing business. Funnily enough, I was just finishing a book for the other agent which I hoped he could sell. Crime pays, he says, so I re-wrote a crime thriller I had put aside from years ago. So I'd like to find a agent primarily for Remote Control, but also for the two books I have for 10 to 14 year olds. I'm sure they're publishable, but you need an agent because that's the way the publishers and agents have rigged the game.