The Burglar in the Library Read Online Free PDF

more affordable than California. He was also thinking about moving back to England. He wound up staying in California, but, according to Lester Harding Ross, he actually did visit Coxe at his home in Connecticut.”
    “When?”
    “That’s not clear, but it was probably sometime in the summer or fall of ’41.” I slipped behind the counter and found my copy of A Penny a Word—and Worth It! “Here’s what Ross has to say. ‘I wish I could find a letter Coxe wrote me aroundthat time. It seems Chandler came east to confer with his people at Knopf, then stayed a day or two with the Coxes. One night they drove to visit some friends named Fortnoy or Fontenoy, and also visiting were Hammett and the Hellman woman. Evidently Fortnoy or Fontenoy or whatever his name was had a free hand with the liquor bottle, and all in attendance drank deeply. Chandler had brought along a copy of his book, and made a big show of presenting it to Hammett, writing a flowery inscription on the flyleaf. The rich thing is that he’d originally brought the book with him from California as a gift for Coxe, and now had no copy to give him! Coxe’s words on the subject were wonderfully wry, but, alas, his letter must have been a casualty of one of our many moves.’”
    “‘The Hellman woman.’ Lillian Hellman?”
    “Uh-huh. She’d bought Hardscrabble Farm in 1939, and Hammett spent a good deal of time there. The farm wasn’t exactly a hop-skip-and-jump from Cuttleford House, but it wouldn’t have been more than a two-hour drive.”
    “I must have missed something, Bern. When did Ross say anything about Cuttleford House?”
    “He didn’t. But he said something about a man named Fontenoy.”
    “And?”
    “And I looked for references to Fortnoy or Fontenoy in the biographies of Hammett and Chandler, but I couldn’t find anything close. I also looked for any indication that a presentation copy of The Big Sleep had been part of Dashiell Hammett’s estate, or Lillian Hellman’s. I checked auction records, and I called people in the booktrade who would be likely to know about that sort of thing. I checked the letters of George Harmon Coxe, to see if he reported the incident to any of the other people he corresponded with.”
    “Did he?”
    “He may have, but I couldn’t turn up anything. They have some of his papers at Columbia, and I spent a few hours going through them with a very helpful librarian, and I found plenty of references to Chandler and Hammett, but nothing to confirm Chandler’s trip east, let alone his second meeting with Hammett.”
    “I don’t suppose he mentioned Fontenoy, either.”
    “’Fraid not.”
    “Maybe Ross dreamed the whole thing up.”
    “That occurred to me,” I admitted. “It also struck me that I was searching in a coal mine for a black cat that wasn’t there. I gave up, finally, and months later I started seeing a woman with a mad passion for the England of tea cozies and corpses in the gazebo, and I heard something about Cuttleford House, so I called them up and asked them to send me a brochure.”
    “And they did.”
    “And they did,” I agreed, “and it was pretty impressive. I was going to show it to you earlier, but I can’t remember what I did with it.”
    “That’s okay, Bern. I’m going anyway, so what do I need with the brochure?”
    “I almost took the same position. After a quick glance I knew it was the perfect place to take Lettice, so why bother reading the history of the place? But it was interestingly written, and business was slow that day.”
    “For a change.”
    “Right. So I started reading, and they mentioned the various hands the property had passed through, and it turned out that a man named Forrest Fontenoy had owned it for a couple of years. The chronology’s a little uncertain, but he definitely would have been the owner from the time The Big Sleep was published until the time Hammett was accepted into the United States Army.”
    “That does a lot for