Martin Booth

In 2001, while in Paris & working security for Madonna, I met a beautiful young Welch woman who worked in management at the Hotel de Crillon. At the moment of our first meeting, I was holding my bag and showing from the unzipped top portion, along with notebooks and other books whose titles could not be seen, was clearly a copy of Tom Clancy "The Bear and the Dragon". She saw me clock her downward glance at this title and her visible repulsion from it. Almost as if she went from impressed that a knuckle dragger there to provide violence was bilingual & intelligent, her "oh he reads" look changed to "oh he reads that kind of shite" in a nanosecond.


Could have claimed that it wasn't mine, that it had been given to me, that it was the only thing in English at the airport book store that I hadn't read, all which would have been true. Or I could have pointed to one of the other books underneath it (security is inherently boring and much reading is done while the principal sleeps), but that would have been compensating and compensating quickly becomes overcompensating.


Instead I learned from the incident, and never having gotten a date with said beauty, the lesson, like all 'what might have been' lessons, it had been dearly learned. That is not to say that I carried/staged a copy of some high brow work everywhere I went from then on, rather I just made sure that I was able to completely defend the merits of title I was reading or I wouldn't read it.


So it was a copy of Martin Booth's "A Very Private Gentlemen" that I happened to be carrying when I first met, and then worked for, George Clooney in 2004 in Amsterdam. I would like to believe that it was I who introduced him to the work, which he later starred in the move of, called "The American" (2010) - which I haven't gotten to see yet, but I could not say. A very nice man who kept his own counsel in the matter, I did notice him noticing it, so who knows. I am just thrilled that any of Martin Booth's works have come to film and I hope more will.


Martin Booth creates characters where ones sympathies goes, regardless of whether they be villain or hero. Having grown up in the far east when it was still part of the British Empire, he sets many of his works there and they are all illuminating pictures of a time passed by someone who was there then, a fantastic recipe for historical fiction.