I’d just finished reading Mr Nice when a jiffy bag containing a far stranger book dropped onto my mat: Pulp Election by Carmen St Keeldare. I was instantly alerted, the author’s name sounded so much like another Howard Hunt alias. I dived in and was not disappointed. This was the companion volume to the Marks autobiography. Secret State confessions recycled as gash fiction. (Hackwork cobbled together by a manic, Post-Modern autodidact. A collagist who lurched from T.S. Eliot to Mickey Spillane.) A text so fractured and peculiar, so dark in its obsessions, that it could only have been assembled by an entire office of black propagandists. And what’s more, Howard Marks was quickly keyed into the story as a character (or signifier).

Next, I called my ex-accomplice (from the MI6 days), Howard Marks ... and asked if he still had access to the bent CIA guy with the gadget that could tap into the tap and reach the number behind it ... Howard came round and we soon got the number of the fascists tapping my phone ... I reckoned it was some kind of new technology, sending holographic interference waves down the line, fed back upon themselves and diffracted through trillion-bit laser-illuminated crystal cubes of artificial diamond, to turn my mind into something resembling a belly-full of pulsating quanta-distressed baby jelly-fish inside the irradiated body of an unpensioned schizophrenic ex-CIA dolphin.

The ravings of a new-wave physicist, someone who had worked with Francis Crick. And done too much mescaline. A classic William Burroughs paranoid believing herself to be the only person ‘in possession of all the facts’. Ms Keeldare’s text was paralysed with self-consciousness, mesmerised by its own audacity. Out of the stew of Hank Janson autopsy porn, lingering photo sessions with beautiful corpses fished out of the Thames, came shafts of wit, parodies of Victorian three-deckers. Jane Eyre put to the sword. The ‘Madame in the attic’. ‘And, Derrida, I married him.’ Repetitions of terrible jokes: ‘a port in every girl’.

Keeldare knew just what she was doing: ‘The two parasitic mythemes, fiction andfaction, hungrily feeding on each other ... amounted to some kind of composite truth.’ The novel had been put together, in a hurry, as a riposte to the Marks version. It used some of the same characters and most of the plot. It was being circulated among the usual counter-culture outposts (piles of copies in Compendium Bookshop, Camden Town). And it was being sent to anyone who was known to be reviewing Mr Nice. The book appeared to be vanity-published – but which frustrated novelist could afford such a slick, hardcover production? The name ‘Bluedove’ was a covert gesture in the direction of the Conservative logo.

Pulp Election borrowed the parodic form of Dennis Potter’s Singing Detective, and Martin Rowson’s hardboiled Waste Land comic-strip, but plagiarism was only one of its boasts. There was also the mirror-world voyeurism of Blackeyes. The Secret State, according to Keeldare, fed on perversion, an occulted sexuality. ‘She was wearing a long black leather coat, and was naked underneath, except for a black leather corset, which I untied slowly ...’ Fetishistic rituals forced into the computer, alongside dreary extracts from Peter Wright’s ghosted memoirs. Everything that is not forbidden is compulsory.

‘The book was a detective novel, in code – if you knew how to decipher the names and the places.’ I was beginning to work it out. I alternated chapters with parallel passages from Mr Nice. Keeldare borrowed her victim, Rachael Neal, from a true-life killing (in case I missed the point, there was a newspaper cutting slipped into the book). ‘I pulled out the knife and started stabbing her in the back and she turned around and called my name ... The attack was carried out near the perimeter fence at RAF Coltishall.’ The murdered Norfolk student was called Rachael Lean. Keeldare was one of those anagram-fixated conspiracy freaks who uses documentary evidence (photocopied newscuttings, accounts of fireballs over stone circles) as confirmation of their seriously skewed world view. ‘The capricious process by which facts mysteriously copulate with facts and breed fiction – the way fiction copulates with fiction and breeds crime ... Coincidence was becoming a much more pervasive kind of logic than reason.’

I began to see where Keeldare’s Christian name came from: Carmen Callil. The subtext of the book was a satire on the Booker Prize (doomed to failure). It suggested that the whole thing was a fix. Revealing an author so out of touch with metropolitan gossip that she felt this was worth mentioning. Who would bother to carry out such an elaborate literary hoax, having fun with David Lodge and his alleged plagiarism of Mrs Gaskell’s North and South? Someone who wanted to carry the argument from a class perspective. ‘Their fantasies were always class-based ... Romance – but with its secret, repressed underbelly revealed. Whores. Drugs. Prostitution. Bondage.’ The illicit marriage of the publishing industry and the Secret State, a conspiracy to silence Carmen St Keeldare. A leaked transcript from Smith Square disguised as a Derek Raymond ‘Factory’ thriller. ‘Chapter by chapter – an embodiment, lock, stock and barrel, of the next Tory manifesto. Almost every sickly hypocritical promise and lie had been injected, like an infection, into the text of our book ... To make the Tory election manifesto into a Booker Prize-winning romance novel.’ The plot thins nicely when Lord Archer’s collection of Booker winners turns up on a stall in Petticoat Lane. And Archer demands a national referendum – to help him find the title for his next faction novel. Before John Major, wisely, decides to pick up his cards and retire to New Zealand.

Pulp Election was so blatantly ghosted that it should have been reviewed by Madame Blavatsky. I wanted to know who was behind it. Whose cod autobiography this was. ‘I had to be careful not to let slip to anyone that I was writing my memoirs. Too many people would know instantly how explosive such a book could be, and guess my reason for writing it – nothing less than – to bring the Government down! If news of my literary project was leaked, I’d be rubbed out of my own story before I’d finished the prologue.’

I had to move fast (the Keeldare style is addictive), to follow the clues so lavishly scattered across these pulp pages. (Pulp with Bloomsbury production values.) Milton Crookshank, the disgraced operative, trails the woman, with whom he is linked in fetishism (‘black leather so tight it looked as if it was painted on her by Leonor Fini’), to Kettering. To a second-hand bookshop. A shop that I discovered, when I visited the town, containing a fine selection of books by a local author. All of them self-published. Nobody goes to Kettering without a very good reason. It was beginning to fit together. An Arab in dark glasses sitting in the back of a gleaming Mercedes clinched it. I tracked the car through the pylonslung countryside to a virtually unmapped village.

Keeldare admits that she has given the bones of her story – ‘an involute of improbable narratives’ – to a journalist from Harpers. I checked the current (November 1996) issue to see if there was anything crazy enough to fit my script. And there it was, a four-page spread, on a self-published and otherwise unremarked novel, The Risen. ‘Writer, filmmaker, falconer to Arab princes, former boyfriend of Bianca Jagger ... Jenny Fabian profiles the counter-culture’s greatest chronicler’.

Fabian, another notable Sixties floater, author of Groupie and A Chemical Romance(‘Life in a world where the extraordinary is commonplace and to be commonplace is a sin’), had been hired to come forward as the author of Pulp Election when the story broke. Which, of course, it never did. Fabian was an unrequired ghost for whom there would be no author interviews, and no profiles, other than those she wrote herself. To resurrect a career that had been taking a long sabbatical. Her comeback was this glowing tribute to Peter Whitehead. ‘Peter looked like a Nordic god, with wild blond hair, and an intense charm.’

This was the same Whitehead who had been the chief prosecution witness in the Howard Marks trial. (‘The suave figure of Whitehead climbed into the witness-box. He had blondish hair and a moustache that was slightly reminiscent of Clark Gable,’ according to David Leigh in High Time.) This was the egg smuggler from the high Arctic who was able to brandish letters of support, signed ‘Philip’, on notepaper from Windsor Castle. (‘Falconers, just as much as birdwatchers, want to prevent the extinction of birds of prey. No one has worked harder to achieve this than Peter Whitehead.’) This was the man who now admitted – boasted of – his responsibility forPulp Election. This was the man who, Howard Marks said, ‘knew an awful lot, but never for one second thought of becoming a grass’.

Even more than Marks, Whitehead felt the compulsion to tell his story. An endless, Arabian Nights’ pipe-dream, each tale more fantastic than the last. Every episode backed by hard evidence: videos, interviews on Swedish television, reports from San Francisco, mounds of newspaper clippings. (‘Dawn Raiders Swoop on Saudi Falcon Smugglers.’ Sunday Times. ‘Seeking Enlightenment through an Ancient Sport. Falconer Peter Whitehead Looks Back on a Life that Soared, Then Sank.’ Wall Street Journal. ‘Falcon Smuggling and the British Connection’. New Scientist. ‘Film Director is Fined for Snatching Eagles.’ Daily Mail. ‘Philip Ready to Fight for the Falcons!’ Nigel Dempster, Daily Mail. ‘MI6 Gags Spy Who Has Vanished into the Cold.’ Sunday Times.) The sort of documentation that has to be provided by the archivists of the Secret State. The precise package that comes with Mr Nice, a crisp mound of Howard Marks cuttings.

There was no other form in which Whitehead’s amazing story could be told. He’d been driven, he said, to use fiction. Worried about his health, his safety, he wrote his books fast, at night. There were already half a dozen novels in various stages of development. He’d published a few himself. Released them in obscure places. ‘I’m not a crime writer. I’m writing my memoirs to bring down the Government.’ He would end each session of his debriefing with the same cryptic hook. ‘You must come back. Next time I’ll tell you the true story.’ And he would give me another book to read, another number to call.

What became increasingly clear was that Whitehead was the invisible man, always at the edge of the frame, never there when the net closed in. Zelig-like, he moved through the history of the counter-culture. Filming the Rolling Stones at the time of Jagger’s drug bust. Involved with Howard Marks, and renting a Scottish estate to receive a major shipment from Colombia, at the time the arrests were made. Falconer to Prince Khaled al Faisal in the Gulf. Implicated (as ‘Pete the Porn’) in a CIA sting operation in Canada. Travelling in Afghanistan, like a John Buchan clubman-adventurer, just ahead of the war zone. Always there, never remembered. ‘Double-dealing provocateur, arms salesman, terrorist (but for whom, no one had ever figured out) ... covert MI5 operative’.

Whitehead’s favourite image is the caduceus, interwoven narratives, twin lives twisting around a single stem. Two working-class boys who decided to fuck the system from the inside. Howard Marks who went public, charmed the media and the judiciary, took the fall. And Whitehead – who stalked him through the shadows, logging the images, backdating the evidence, editing reality – waited for the moment when he could use an obscure, self-published pulp novel to fabricate the beginning of the fantastic story of his many lives and careers.