The Burglar in the Library Read Online Free PDF Page A

commit it for reasons, not just to provide a corpse; and with the means at hand, not hand-wrought dueling pistols, curare, and tropical fish.’”
    “Tropical fish?”
    “‘He put these people down on paper as they were,’” I went on, “‘and he made them talk and think in the language they customarily used for these purposes.’ Wait, there’s more. ‘He was spare, frugal, hardboiled, but he did over and over again what only the best writers can ever do at all. He wrote scenes that never seemed to have been written before.’” I closed the book. “He wrote that in 1944, in an essay for The Atlantic. I wonder if Hammett ever saw it. He was in the army at the time, stationed in Alaska during the Aleutians campaign.”
    “Wasn’t he a little old for that?”
    “He was born in 1894, so he would have been forty-eight in 1942 when he enlisted. On top of that his health wasn’t good. He’d had TB, and his teeth were bad.”
    “And they took him anyway?”
    “Not the first two times he tried to enlist. The third time around they weren’t as finicky, and they took him after he had some teeth pulled. Then after the war they jailed him when he refused to tell a Congressional committee if he’d been a communist.”
    “Was he?”
    “Probably, but who cares? He wasn’t a candidate for president. He was just a writer who hadn’t written much of anything in twenty years.”
    “What did Hammett think of Chandler?”
    “As far as anybody knows, he never expressed an opinion.” I shrugged. “You know, it’s entirely possible he never read a thing Chandler wrote. But I think he had the opportunity.”
    “What do you mean?”
    “I think the two of them met a second time, two years or so after Chandler’s first novel was published. I think Chandler brought a copy of the book with him and presented it to Hammett.”
    “And?”
    “And I think I know where the book is,” I said. “I think it’s at Cuttleford House.”

CHAPTER
Four
    C handler never mentioned a second meeting, I told Carolyn, and neither did Hammett. But nine or ten months ago I’d been browsing through some books I’d bought for store stock, and I wound up getting caught up in one I’d never seen before, a memoir called A Penny a Word—and Worth It! by an old pulp writer called Lester Harding Ross.
    Carolyn had never heard of him.
    “Neither had I,” I told her. “Ross seems to have been a hack of all trades. He turned out thousands of words of fiction every day, none of it very good but all of it publishable. He wrote sports stories and western stories and detective stories and science fiction stories, and he did all of his work under pen names. He listed thirty pen names in his book, and admitted that there were others he’d forgotten. He really did spend his life writing for a cent a word, and never seems to have aspired to anything more. I hope he did a little better with his autobiography. It’s pretty interesting stuff, andI’d hate to think he only got six or seven hundred dollars for it.”
    “He probably dashed it off in three days.”
    “Well, that’s all the time Voltaire spent writing Candide. But all of that’s beside the point. The thing is, Ross really enjoyed being a writer, whether or not he took much pride in the stuff he was writing. And he enjoyed the company of other writers. He was acquainted with most of the pulp writers of his era, directly or by correspondence.”
    “Including Hammett and Chandler?”
    “Well, no, as a matter of fact. But including George Harmon Coxe.”
    “I know that name.”
    “I’m not surprised. He published a lot of books, good tough hardboiled stuff. And he was a friend of Chandler’s. After The Big Sleep came out, Chandler wrote to Coxe, who had just built a house in Connecticut. Chandler was interested in moving there himself.”
    “It’s hard to imagine Philip Marlowe in Connecticut. He’s such an L.A. kind of guy.”
    “I know, but Chandler was looking for some place