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The books continue along the shelf, more than a decade passing with them, until finally we arrive at The Qwerty Machinegun by Thomas Quinn, my own first novel. I posted this particular copy to my father on publication day, only to have it come back a week later with a curt note from someone I’d never met – ‘Too little, too late’, it said.

Too little, too late. The obituaries began to appear a few days later. My timing has always been lousy. My father – my talking, speaking, moving, breathing, hand-holding father – had come apart for good.

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Just beyond The Qwerty Machinegun, standing behind my own first novel like the Empire State Building stands behind that little church in New York, is another first novel – Cupid’s Engine.

This huge book sits at the absolute centre of my shelf like a great, dark keystone, every inch of its creased and battered cover plastered with praise: ‘The crime novel of the decade’, ‘An intricate puzzle-box of delights’, ‘addictive and astonishing’, ‘a feast for whodunit fans’, ‘flawless’, ‘remarkable’, and somewhere in amongst it all, ‘“A uniquely talented writer” –Stanley Quinn’. My father rarely supported other writer’s books in this way, but then, Cupid’s Engine is remarkable in at least half a dozen different ways. The book’s author, Andrew Black, barely gets a mention on this particular cover, but that hasn’t stopped the name looming large in the imaginations of the literary press and reading public in the nine long years since Cupid’s Engine first found print. ‘A mysterious and elusive mastermind’ says the quote from the Independent. And they would know. They, like everyone else, had been unable to land an interview, or even an author picture to run alongside their five-star review. No details about Andrew Black were available at the book’s publication; nobody talked to Black; nobody met Black, and that remains the case even to this day. Conspiracy theories, hoaxes, blurry author photos and doctored documents all did the rounds and were debunked and dismissed in turn. Black’s publishers offer nothing but coy smiles and upturned palms when questioned, knowing that that mystery does nothing to hurt book sales, and Black’s agent, Sophie Almonds, continues to issue the exact same statement, year on year, in response to any and all enquiries: ‘Andrew Black is not available for comment or interview, but he thanks you for your interest in his work.’