Lindsay groaned. “Bigger highway robbers than Dick Turpin.”

“Yeah, well, old man King retired to Spain on his redundo some time in the mid-eighties, leaving his wife behind.”

“How did you find all this out?” Helen demanded. “I know you’re nosy, but that’s ridiculous!”

Kirsten grinned. “I was standing next to his dad during the speeches, which were mostly the kind that can only be improved by talking through them. He told me his entire life story, most of which, thankfully, I have managed to erase from the memory banks.”

“So how did an East End cowboy get to be a gentleman publisher?” Lindsay asked, trying to keep the conversation on track.

“Who said anything about gentleman?” Kirsten said, eyebrows steepling. “Danny’s mum was a great believer in self-improvement, and she was always encouraging her little lad to read. When he ducked out of school, his dad called in a few favors and got him a job in the print works of one of the big publishing houses. From there, Danny parlayed himself a job as a sales rep. Supposedly he was a very good one. Then he won the pools.”

“You’re kidding!” Helen exclaimed. “How much?”

“A mill and a quarter. Which was a lot of cash eleven or so years ago.”

“It’s a lot of cash now,” Lindsay pointed out. “And he set up a publishing house?” The incredulity in her voice was matched only by the expression on Helen’s face.

“That’s right. He announced to a waiting world that nobody was publishing the books he’d wanted to read as a teenager, or the books he’d wanted to sell, or the books he wanted to read now, and he was going to fill the gap in the market. Everybody laughed at him, of course. Publishing was in a decline, the market was shrinking, there were too many books and not enough buyers already. And of course, he was a toerag from the wrong side of the tracks without the requisite English degree. But he proved them all wrong.”

“So what kind of stuff does Monarch publish? Apart from Penny’s Darkliners series?” Lindsay asked.

Kirsten dug a packet of cigarettes out of her dressing-gown pocket and lit up. “It’s a pretty eclectic list. Mostly fiction, mostly by young writers who don’t come out of the sausage factory of university and journalism. The keynote is that it’s all slightly off the wall, out of the mainstream. Cult fiction. Acid-head dole-ite narrators. Travel guides to places you didn’t know you wanted to go to till you read the book. Their slogan is, ‘Fact or fiction—in your face.’ Your friend Penny was his first big success, but there have been others since.”

“How did he do it? What made it work?” Lindsay asked. Her curiosity was pricked now, and it was nothing to do with Penny.

Kirsten shrugged. “He was one of the first to abandon hardback publishing and go for good-quality softback originals that were only a pound or two more expensive than mass-market paperbacks. The books had a strong corporate image, so they stood out on the shelves. He hired people who weren’t afraid to back their hunches on new writers. And he marketed the books with a bit of chutzpah. They advertised in music mags, style mags, top-end women’s glossies—places where publishers hadn’t gone before, except with individual titles. It wasn’t any one thing—it was the way he combined ideas.”