Often in my imaginary future as a celebrity novelist I’m asked about my process, and how it is that I so tightly weave the complementary causes of research and procrastination. The answer is deceptively simple; quality source material.

Reading better writers is never a bad idea (unless you’re Dickens — if you’re Dickens your options are Shakespeare or getting drunk and reading Dickens) and so I always have at least a Christie and a Wodehouse and a Dickens on rotation. The syllabus shifts a bit when I’m researching distilling or golf or horse racing or, as in the case of Monet for Nothing, the third Teddy Quillfeather, the Lost Generation in Paris of the 1920s. 

Anyone who’s read my books or even this article knows that I don’t aspire to Hemingway’s economy of language, but I recognise the easy charisma of his writing and subscribe entirely to his belief in the mot juste; I’ll happily spend a day searching for the right word if the current placeholder is merely evocative and accurate but has too few or too many syllables for the rhythm of the sentence. So it was a pleasure to justify revisiting A Moveable Feast, a celebration of Paris and the era and the work of a great writer that also happened to function as excellent research for a book in which Gertrude Stein, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Les Deux Magots, and Hemingway himself make an appearance.

I also re-read That Summer in Paris by Morley Callaghan, the sourcewaters of the now entrenched view of Hemingway as maker of his own mythology in the boxing and bull rings, with which I have such fun making fun, now he’s not here to challenge me to put the gloves on.

However I enjoyed and learned the most from a book and author who for me was a new discovery; Paris Was Our Mistress by Sam Putnam is an erudite, affectionate, informed biography of a decade. Putnam’s fame is principally that his was the first modern-language translation of Quixote, but it was his role as editor and journalist in Paris in the 1920s that afforded him access to the personalities and pertinent places of the day, and the book includes his interviews with Hemingway, Picasso, Stein, and Pirandello, and his first-hand impressions of Cocteau, Madox Ford, Joyce, Pound, Surrealism, Cubism, Communism, Imagism, Aestheticism, and pernod.

I learned a great deal from Paris Was Our Mistress, such as the fact that, in the view of Gertrude Stein, I’m lazy; “My prose is obscure only to the lazy-minded. It is a well, a deep well, well it is like a well and that is well.” She certainly has my number.

Which I hope goes some distance in undoing the impression possibly given above that Monet for Nothing, if it’s not obvious from the title, is a stiff study of Left Bank intellectualism and high art — nothing could be further from the truth. Monet for Nothing is a simple heist comedy backdropped by a fondly researched parody.

In the interests of fullness, here’s the full research bibliography for Monet for Nothing, but quite frankly many and even most of them were chosen less for suitability than obtainability, and the only titles that I’d recommend to a friend are A Moveable Feast and Paris Was Our Mistress (although in that case I wouldn’t so much recommend as insist).

Being Geniuses Together, Kay Boyle and Robert McAlmon
Dateline Toronto, Ernest Hemingway
Exiles Return, Malcolm Cowley
A Guide to Hemingway’s Paris, John Lela
A Moveable Feast, Ernest Hemingway
Paris Was Our Mistress, Sam Putnam
That Summer in Paris, Morley Callaghan
When Paris Sizzled, Mary McAuliffe