Macmillan £18.99 pp400

The publicity campaign proclaims that “The Master Is Back” — well, advertisers rarely do irony. How far does the latest blockbuster from Henry James’s heir provide a practical seminar for aspiring novelists? Here is a summary of his lesson.

Character: Comfort readers with what they already know. Tell them that the ultra-rich Tokyo businessman displays “typical Japanese inscrutability”. Reassure them later that he has “an inscrutable smile”. Call your New York detective Jack Delaney and make him drool about his mother’s Irish stew. Repeat this often, just in case he might have switched allegiance to bagels or Big Macs. Bring in an unflappable English butler who calls his blue-blooded employer “M’lady”, and oppose them to an evil, power-crazed Romanian monster and his depraved enforcer. Make her Romanian, too.

Plot: Take an idea from an 1893 Sherlock Holmes story and wrap it in pages of stuff about real and fake Van Goghs. Get people to pretend to be dead, follow each other in cars and talk a lot about huge sums of money. Pad this by enumerating (not describing) countless occasions when they handle credit cards and mobile phones, wait in airport lounges, take showers and drink coffee. Offer thrills as the detective buys “a pair of jeans, four shirts, four pairs of socks, four pairs of underpants, two ties (special offer), a packet of razors, shaving cream, aftershave, soap, toothbrush and toothpaste”. Indulge at length your preoccupation with lying, bullying, malice, chicanery, duplicity and revenge.

Dialogue: Display your ear for the vernacular. Use streetwise phrases such as “this evil charade” and “such an ordeal”. Present an American saying to yet another Romanian: “Stop thinking like a school prefect.” Show how a mother should address her daughter: “There is a sadness in your eyes.” Remember that when the knife-wielding female psychopath is in bed with the heroine (“the blade was a centimetre from the clitoris”), she will employ scrupulously formal syntax: “Should you be foolish enough to attempt anything, let me assure you that I can kill you.”

Style: Exhibit your subtle linguistic range. Say that Ceausescu ran a “draconian regime”. Call the same object a letter, a missive and an epistle within one paragraph. Tell us that an art dealer has “countless catalogues stored in the database of her brain”. Evoke the atmosphere of a senior common room: “the sound of good-humoured chatter as tutors swapped anecdotes”.

Sophistication: Insert redundant pieces of conversation so that characters can define aphasia or explain who Caravaggio was. Add lists of English portrait painters or fauvists. Mention on three occasions that rich people inhabit cars in which smoked-glass screens insulate the passenger from the driver.

Authenticity: Allow one honest sentence to emerge from all this feeble, formulaic footling. Give your elderly aristocrat the chance to say on page 352 that “we have been giving honours to pop stars, footballers and vulgar millionaires”. Cherish this tiny seed of self-knowledge, Lord Archer.

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