Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 141, Nos. 3 & 4. Whole Nos. 858 & 859, March/April 2013

The Jacket Blurbs Puzzle by Jon L. Breen

Jon L. Breen is known to all longtime EQMM readers for the thirty years he served as the regular reviewer for our book-review column The Jury Box. He still contributes two columns per year to that department, but he has more time now to devote to fiction-writing. The California author is a critically acclaimed novelist; this new short story is a sequel to his February 2007 EQMM tale “The Missing Elevator Puzzle,” which received a nomination for that year’s Barry Award.

The Tuesday before the murder at Worden University’s Conference on Bestselling Fiction found Stephen Fenbush in the campus bookstore browsing among a display of the conferees’ books. It was a crisp I December morning, with a prospect of snow for the weekend, and Stephen was so happily settled into his position as Film Critic in Residence, he had begun to wish the appointment lasted more than one year.

Of the five participants in the bestseller conference, two were members of the Worden faculty: the English Department’s Cosmo McDougall, who had made the New York Times list with four or five political suspense novels, and Amos Bosworth, the physics professor whose first novel, a techno-thriller in the Tom Clancy tradition, had made a splash almost commensurate with the big push it had received from his publisher. The other three represented disparate categories of popular fiction: Callie Jackson had made an industry of the Hollywood roman à clef; Gresham Turnbow was a leading practitioner of legal thrillers; and Muriel Bates had found a niche in romance both historical and contemporary.

A young female student was systematically picking up a book from each pile, reading from a few pages at random, making disparaging clucks and disdainful gasps. Finally, she looked up and said to Stephen, “They’re all terrible, aren’t they? Can’t anybody on the bestseller list write at all?”

“Oh, most of them can,” Stephen said with the wisdom of almost four decades on earth. “But it’s not a requirement.”

“You’re Mr. Fenbush, aren’t you? The film critic?”

“Guilty.”

“Hi, I’m Willy Ames. That’s short for Williametta.” She offered a hand for shaking. “I’m looking forward to attending your silent-classics series. I’m so glad you’re not doing only the comedies, though some would say that is a brave decision.”

“Or a foolhardy one,” Stephen said with a smile.

“I adore old films. But what a dismal life you must lead having to watch all those horrible new Hollywood atrocities.”

“Well, at least they don’t take as long as reading a bestseller.”

“Maybe. But I wouldn’t have to put in more than a couple of hours on any of these.”

“Speed reader?”

She shook her head. “Speed skimmer, speed skipper, speed gagger.”

Willy was dressed in the drabbest possible student attire, faded baggy jeans, oversize gray sweatshirt, worn and aged sneakers. She had a practical short haircut but a lovely face free of makeup and apparent piercings.

“I’m making a study of these,” Willy said, casting a hand over the display of blockbusters. “I should probably read a few all the way through before this weekend, shouldn’t I?”

“Why?” Stephen said. “I mean, if you have such a low opinion of them.”

“I need to figure out the formula. I’m going to write one to help finance graduate school.”

“You think it’s that easy?”

“It worked for Michael Crichton, didn’t it? And he was Tolstoy compared to most of these people. It must be a real effort to write this badly. I must ask Professor McDougall how he does it.”

“I’d be careful how I phrased that, if you do,” Stephen said.

“Oh yes, I can be tactful if I try very, very hard.”

“Well,” Stephen said, glancing at his watch, “I’m late for a meeting. Good luck with your writing, and I’ll see you at the silents program.”

“Where is your meeting, Mr. Fenbush?”

“Over in the library.”

She replaced the book she had been holding and said, “I’m going that way. My next class is in Lyden Hall. May I walk with you?”

“Ah, sure.”

She donned a bulky anorak from the coat rack by the door, and they set off across the picturesque campus together. Willy was quiet for around thirty seconds. Then she looked over at Stephen and said, “I know how I seem to you. The naivete and arrogance of youth personified, isn’t that right?”

“There are nicer words for it.”

“I prefer accurate to nice. Usually. Is it true Professor McDougall and Professor Bosworth hate each other?”

“What?”

“That’s what I’ve heard. And I noticed on those books by the writers in the bestseller conference that Professor McDougall had a quote on the back recommending every one of them. Except Professor Bosworth’s. They really must hate each other.”

“Look, Willy, I’ve only been on campus a few months, so I’m really not up on faculty relationships. And anyway, I really shouldn’t be exchanging gossip with a student.”

“Oh my God, a student! A different species. Be careful what you say.” She smiled. “But you’re probably wise. If they do hate each other, it may just be that they don’t understand each other. They come from different places, one a literary person and the other a scientist. They haven’t bridged C.P. Snow’s two cultures.”

Stephen was impressed. He wondered how many Worden undergraduates had even heard of C.P. Snow.

“I wish I could know you better,” Willy went on wistfully. “There’s probably a lot you could teach me. Outside of the classroom, I mean.”

Uh-oh. Stephen had already been feeling a sense of alarm to go with the natural male impulses he was working to keep at bay. Now the alarm was getting louder.

Willy read his expression and laughed. “Don’t worry, Mr. Fenbush. I understand how things are. Back in the day, student-teacher relationships were possible, if not exactly encouraged, and both classes of people could benefit from them. But it’s not that way anymore, is it? And anyway, the whole campus knows your heart belongs to Professor Strom.”

“Oh, does it?”

“Absolutely. She talks about you in class.”

“No, she doesn’t,” Stephen said with confidence. He knew Vanessa that well.

“All right, she doesn’t,” Willy admitted. “Don’t mind me. I just like to tease.”

They had arrived at the crossroads, with Lyden Hall to their left and the Chandler Memorial Library to their right. Stephen was both relieved and a little sorry. Willy said, “It’s been fun talking to you, Mr. Fenbush. Will I see you at the bestseller conference?”

“Uh, sure, probably. Good luck with your writing.”

Stephen walked across to the library, pondering how the whole campus could know about his relationship with Vanessa Strom. Hadn’t they been almost absurdly discreet? Ah, well, gossip would find a way.

When he reached the top of the library steps, a fast-moving figure in a white lab coat came storming through the tall doors and plowed into him. The much larger man gripped Stephen by the shoulders just long enough to prevent him from falling, rasped out a barely civil “Excuse me,” and continued on his angry way down the steps. Though they had never met, Stephen recognized Professor Amos Bosworth from a much happier view on the back jacket of his novel.

Just inside the door, Stephen saw the other parties to his meeting, which was more accurately a lunch date. Vanessa Strom, the tall and elegant Professor of English who had occupied much of his time and thoughts since his arrival on campus, was in close conversation with Edie Yamamoto, the petite and energetic collection-development librarian. Stephen had pegged her for a youthful fifty until he found out she was a very youthful sixty.

When she finally looked up and saw him standing there, Vanessa said simply, “Oh, hi, Stephen. Save the smart comments for once. Edie’s had a tough morning.”

“Not really,” Edie said. “It’s infuriating, but it’s funny too.”

“Let’s hear about it,” Stephen demanded. “Something to do with Professor Bosworth, by any chance? He nearly ran over me on his way out.”

“We shouldn’t talk about it here,” said Vanessa.

“You’ve been talking about it, haven’t you?”

“Yes, but we’re capable of talking quietly. Your voice booms off the four walls.”

At a quiet table in the Faculty Club, a bottle of zinfandel at the ready, Edie Yamamoto unburdened.

“It comes down to this,” she said. “University libraries don’t collect schlock fiction.”

Stephen said, “And you told Bosworth that?”

“Of course not. I was very diplomatic. I know how to handle prickly academics. I’ve been dealing with them for almost forty years. But I still provoked him enough for the reaction you saw. He’ll probably complain about me to the Librarian.”

Edie pronounced the capital letter on the word with the faintest of irony. The thirtyish Gillian Godfrey, recently appointed to administer the Chandler Memorial Library and all the satellite collections scattered over Worden’s campus, had decades less experience and probably less librarian smarts than Edie.

“There’s popular fiction and popular fiction,” Edie went on. “Some of it has real literary merit.”

“But not the sort of thing Amos Bosworth hit the jackpot with,” Stephen put in. “I heard somebody describe his book as Tom Clancy with all the military and technological detail but none of the elegant style.”

“That’s lovely,” said Vanessa.

“Anyway” Edie said, “action-adventure in simplistic, flavorless prose has its place, but how could I possibly justify spending the university’s book budget on that kind of thing? I simply couldn’t do it, and I tried to make him understand”

“It’s not as if students who want to read it won’t have a chance,” Stephen mused. “You know the public library’s buying multiple copies. The hardcover’s heavily discounted all over the place. If you have an e-reader, it’s cheaper still. And I imagine he’d rather have the sales, wouldn’t he? Why does he care so much?”

“Prestige?” Edie said with a shrug. “Self-esteem?”

“Wait a minute, though. I’ve seen Cosmo McDougall’s books on your shelves, and he’s about as schlocky as Bosworth.”

“Not quite,” said Vanessa. “Cosmo has a certain saving wit. It’s sort of like he’s saying to the reader, we both know this is junk, but let’s have a good time with it anyway.”

Stephen snorted. “Yes, I know Cosmo’s a friend of yours.”

“No, not at all, though it pays to stay on good terms with all my colleagues. Cosmo can be quite amusing, but there’s a vicious streak there too.”

“Example, please.”

“He does light verse on the side, most of it pretty good but some of it downright cruel. He has a whole sequence of ten jolly poems celebrating jewel thieves, muggers, forgers, insider traders, bunco artists, Ponzi schemers, and so forth. He told me he has an eleventh that was never published for reasons of his own. He found it all very funny in a Thomas De Quincey vein, and I guess it was, but kind of disquieting too.

“Anyway, there’s another difference between Bosworth and McDougall, a big one,” Edie said. “Professor McDougall donates a copy of each new novel as it comes out. If faculty authors donate their books, they are accepted into the collection as a matter of courtesy. But if the faculty member expects us to buy the book, it has to meet the standards of the library’s acquisition policies. Professor Bosworth wants that validation, and he’s not going to get it.”

“There’s still another difference,” Vanessa pointed out. “Cosmo is in the English Department, and he understands the distinction between literature and, uh, what he’s writing. Amos Bosworth is a scientist, and the difference may be lost on him.”

“That’s it exactly. In my first library job, back in the early seventies, there was a physics professor who had heard all the controversy about Philip Roth’s Portnoy’s Complaint and wanted to read it. I got it for him, and he came back the following week filled with enthusiasm. Reading for pleasure was new to him. Now he wanted to read another bestseller, The Love Machine by Jacqueline Susann. I had to explain to him that we wouldn’t be buying The Love Machine and he should try the public library. He barely understood, and it’s even harder to explain when one of the authors in question is actually on the faculty.”

“You don’t want Amos Bosworth mad at the library,” Stephen said. “He’s too powerful in campus politics.”

Vanessa nodded. “He’s on committees that affect budgetary decisions, building plans, all sorts of things.”

“What’s the book cost anyway, twenty-five bucks? My point is, with the size of the library budget, the expenditure for Bosworth’s book is like filling an eyedropper out of Lake Michigan. Couldn’t you just buy his book?”

“No,” Edie said.

“When you get a book donated, you still spend money to process it, don’t you? So, technically, the library has some outlay even for McDougall’s books.”

“Not my department,” said Edie, “and it doesn’t compromise the integrity of our acquisitions policy. You tell me this, Stephen. If the publisher of Onlooker magazine produced a film, and you thought it was a terrible film, would you give it a favorable review to keep your job?”

“That’s not the same thing at all.”

“To me, it is exactly the same thing.”

“What Amos’s high dudgeon really comes down to...” Vanessa began.

“Does anybody ever have low dudgeon?” Stephen wondered.

“Yes, Stephen, I have low dudgeon, but it will climb rapidly if you keep interrupting me. Amos Bosworth would probably just donate his book if it weren’t for Cosmo McDougall. They used to be friends.”

“Ah!” said Stephen. “One of your students was just asking me this morning about the rumors those two guys hate each other.”

“It’s more than rumors,” Edie said.

“One of my students?” Vanessa said. “Who?”

“Girl named Williametta Ames. Willy for short.”

“Oh, yes, Willy.” Vanessa’s reaction seemed a little guarded and distant.

“So why do Bosworth and McDougall hate each other?”

“I don’t know that Cosmo hates Amos,” Vanessa said, “but the ill feeling flies the other way pretty strongly. Amos asked Cosmo for a quote for the jacket of his first novel. Cosmo hates to do jacket blurbs and used to have a rule against it, though he’s relented somewhat in the past few years.”

“Those books on display for the conference this weekend all seemed to have McDougall quotes. Except Bosworth’s, I mean.”

“Jackson and Turnbow and Bates are all friends of his,” Edie said. “He twisted their arms to participate in the conference, and the jacket quotes may have been a subtle bribe. I think the librarian had some influence with him.”

“Anyway,” Vanessa continued, “Amos thought Cosmo would give him a quote in the name of friendship and faculty solidarity. And Cosmo did, but... well, let’s just say it’s a good thing Amos figured it out in time. I think I can remember what he said. It has its own built-in mnemonic.” She closed her eyes. “ ‘Prose unrivaled! Rare energy! Cunning reader anxiety production!’ ” She smiled across at Stephen. “What do you think?”

Stephen took out a pen and started scribbling on the paper napkin provided for Faculty Club diners. “Try this one,” he said.

He passed the napkin across to Vanessa, who said, “Yes, he gets it,” and passed it on to Edie.

Stephen had written,

“I think mine is better,” Stephen said. “STINKS is shorter and punchier than PURE CRAP. But they’re both too easy to solve. To really bring the stunt off, you’d have to hide your negative message cleverly enough to actually get it placed on the jacket but still make it transparent enough that somebody would decipher it when the book came out.”

“If anyone was mean enough to do that,” Vanessa said, “it’d be Cosmo.”

Table talk turned to other matters. After an hour, Edie Yamamoto looked at her watch and said, “I have to get back to work or the librarian will be after my head. Anyway, you two won’t mind if I leave you alone, will you?”

“I don’t know,” Stephen said. “People might talk.” Edie laughed, but Vanessa didn’t seem amused.

When Edie had left, Stephen said, “Okay, out with it.”

“Be careful of that girl,” Vanessa said.

“Who? Edie?”

“No, not Edie! What girl did you just meet today and become besotted over?”

“I didn’t — you mean Willy? I’m not besotted with anybody but you, Professor Strom, dear. And why should I be careful of her? She seemed nice enough to me.”

“Did she really? Stephen, I know all the signs. You’re a man. I’m a woman. I see things about other women that men don’t. She’s dangerous.”

“Dangerous? Willy the femme fatale?”

“Not fatale maybe, but poisonous nonetheless.”

“Vanessa, you don’t need to be jealous of a student.”

“Jealous of a—? Oh, Stephen, don’t be so tiresome. It’s just that I understand women.”

“I thought you were a feminist. Aren’t women the same as men, obvious physical differences and child-bearing potential apart?”

Vanessa shook her head. “My concept of feminism has always been that a woman should be able to do whatever she wants to do and is capable of doing in life without society putting up artificial barriers of law and gender prejudice to stop her. But I never denied common sense and life experience to claim that men and women think the same or communicate the same or operate the same or always want the same things. And I also understand men a little bit.”

“We’re a lot simpler.”

“Granted. Anyway, be careful of Willy. Yes, she’s brilliant. Yes, she’s charming. Yes, she’s attractive.”

“The way she dresses, she’s doing her best to hide it.”

“If you noticed it, she’s not hiding it all that well, now is she? And that mousy pure student facade makes it all the more dramatic when she chooses to throw it off. Willy is all those things I said, but she’ll manipulate people to get what she wants. Just think over the conversation you had with her. What ploys did she use to try to gain an advantage?”

“She didn’t use any ploys—”

“Think about it. And if you weren’t already involved with a woman as fascinating as I, might you have acted differently in response? Think about that too.”

Advertising quotes in general were a sore point with Stephen Fenbush, as they are with many critics. Since he tended not to write “selling quotes” in his film reviews, what he said rarely appeared in ads, but when it did, it was too often taken out of context to make him appear to like something he’d actually hated. The film world had so many quote whores — TV movie reviewers, talk-show hosts, starstruck bloggers — that there was always a ready source of hyperbolic raves, however awful the product in question. In perusing ads, the savvy filmgoer would look for quotes from print sources, preferably well-known newspapers and national magazines.

The quotes authors gave each other for jacket blurbs were a different matter: an act of friendship, payback, a calling in of literary markers, a big name’s gesture to help out a neophyte, or, very occasionally, a heartfelt message to the blurbing author’s readers that the book in hand was worth their attention.

That afternoon, Stephen felt himself drawn back to the campus bookstore and the current titles representing the bestselling conferees. He had no interest in the books themselves, only the jacket blurbs. He took out a pad and scribbled down McDougall’s quotes on the books by Jackson, Turnbow, and Bates. On the back jacket of McDougall’s own current offering the laudatory quotes came not from other popular novelists but from famous academics. Stephen recognized two professors of English and one of political science from Harvard, Stanford, and the University of Chicago, but the fourth name stood out for a couple of reasons: Malcolm Good, USC. Stephen had never heard of this particular professor, which in itself meant nothing, but why was his academic affiliation given with initials instead of being spelled out in full, as was the case with the other blurbers? He assumed Professor Good must be from the University of Southern California, but the initials could equally denote the University of South Carolina. Stephen wrote that one down as well. By now, the store manager was looking at him suspiciously, but after all, he was faculty, damn it.

Other matters claimed his attention — a lecture he needed to prepare on the early films of Alfred Hitchcock, plans for that silent-movie series — and it wasn’t until Saturday night and the murder that he put together a connection of three of the blurbs that he later thought should have been obvious, plus a joke in the fourth blurb that should have been even more obvious.

A light snowfall on Saturday served only to outline the bare tree branches in white and augment the Worden University campus’s picture-postcard quality. And the weather certainly did nothing to inhibit the turnout at the main evening event of the Conference on Bestselling Fiction. Vanessa, though grumbling that she could be home grading papers, had agreed to attend with Stephen. The five principal attractions, who had already enjoyed a private dinner and (Stephen suspected) free-flowing libations with high-end donors to the library, took the stage of the Terhune Memorial Theatre to face a full house of students, faculty, journalists, members of local writing groups, and others from the town and gown communities.

The five authors would be doing individual lectures and small-group meetings with literary wannabes in the course of the weekend, but this was the only time they would appear on a platform together. In the six chairs, from left to right, were the panel discussion’s moderator, Librarian Gillian Godfrey, who successfully held at bay any professional stereotype with a calculatedly windswept hairdo and low-cut evening dress; Cosmo McDougall, chubby and dapper with a permanent expression of sharing a private joke with himself; Muriel Bates, a tiny grey-haired woman who, apart from her Bronx accent, would have been well cast as British TV’s next Miss Marple; Gresham Turnbow, huge and bearded, exuding courtroom presence without even opening his mouth; Callie Jackson, still a raven-haired stunner from the right angle but dressed decades too young and the recipient of more plastic surgery than one of her Hollywood characters; and Amos Bosworth, looking nervous, eager, excited, and uncomfortable in a suit rather than his customary lab coat.

Gillian told the assembled masses that her guests needed no introduction before spending about fifteen minutes introducing them. Then she beamed at her panelists and said, “You are five of the most successful authors in the Western world, and we are incredibly fortunate to be able to exploit your knowledge and experience this evening. Some of you are full-time writers, but others, amazingly enough, have day jobs, including two members of our own faculty. First, could you each tell us something about what your working schedule is like. We’ll start at the far end with Professor Bosworth.”

Bosworth appeared startled at being asked to speak first. “Well, I’m not really working on a book at the moment. And when I was, I guess my working methods were what you might call — what’s the word I want? — compulsive. Yeah, compulsive. For a solid three years, I was up at three in the morning every single day and banged on my computer till six. The rest of the day I spent on reading, teaching, and research, but even then I was thinking about what I was going to write the next morning. Good thing I can get along without a lot of sleep.”

“In common with other great scientists,” Gillian said. “Edison, for example. Ms. Jackson?”

“I must write every day, wherever I am, even when I’m on tour. I used to write in longhand, using ballpoint pens with the ink color-coded to the mood of the chapter. Now I take a notebook computer with me everywhere and select different fonts and colors to suit the scene I’m working on. I’ve written on private jets, in the Green Room at the Letterman show, on a yacht off Baja California, poolside at resorts all over the world, even between holes on the Old Course at St. Andrew’s. I’m incorrigibly sociable and don’t mind being interrupted when I write, even in the middle of a sentence, but before the day is out, I must complete at least one perfect page, sometimes three or four, maintaining an average of two, thus one book a year.”

“Remarkable dedication! Mr. Turnbow?”

“Callie, I envy your ability to multitask. I can’t write when I’m on trial, though that doesn’t happen often anymore as I only take the occasional case that really interests me. When I’m not on trial, I go to my upstairs study, put a ‘Do not disturb’ on the door — and my wife and the kids and even the dog respect that sign, I can tell you — and write on an old manual typewriter for no more than six or seven hours at a stretch. I play Mozart symphonies while I write. Loud. My teenagers complain about the noise, to give you an idea, but I just remind them who paid for all their expensive junk. When I revise, I cover the typewritten sheets with scribbles in longhand. Then my secretary at the law firm puts them into the computer, ’cause she’s the only one who can read my writing.”

“And do you bill a client for that, Mr. Turnbow?” Muriel Bates asked softly.

He turned to her with an amused expression. “No, I do not.” Pause. “But if I could find an excuse to, I would.”

“And what about your working methods, Ms. Bates?” Gillian Godfrey said.

“Months and months and months of research, often including travel, always involving the great research libraries. Libraries like this one, so my compliments to you and your staff, Ms. Godfrey. The research is the fun part. Then, everything compiled and organized, a month or two of full days at the computer. Writing the thing is sheer agony, but it justifies the pleasure of the research. Truthfully, I’d write nonfiction, real history, if it would pay me, but it wouldn’t, more’s the pity. My most recent book is a contemporary romance, quite outside my usual historical mode, so I spent almost as much time on writing as research. Got a tax-deductible Panama Canal cruise out of it, however.”

“And finally you, Professor McDougall,” Gillian said. “How do you manage?”

“Terrible work habits. Driven by deadlines. Desktop computer. Write in odd moments on no set schedule. Write fast, don’t revise much, do no research.” Cosmo McDougall smiled with appalling self-satisfaction.

“No research, Professor?” Gillian Godfrey said archly. “But your political thrillers have been lauded for their authenticity.”

Cosmo shrugged. “Well, I do read the paper and check out a few websites. Other than that, I make it all up. Politics is politics. I just take my experiences in academe and transfer them to the world stage.”

“Aren’t you afraid your colleagues will recognize themselves?”

“They never have yet.”

“What about you, Professor Bosworth? Do you get any ideas from academic politics?”

Bosworth’s mouth twitched. “I loathe academic politics. The university doesn’t represent the real world. It’s a refuge from reality. Outside of the natural sciences, the university’s a playpen for middle-aged adolescents with crackbrained radical ideas they’d like to impose on the impressionable young.” A few gasps greeted this, one audible hiss, but no actual boos.

“Glad you’re leaving politics out of this, Amos,” Cosmo McDougall said, to general laughter.

“Another general question for all of you,” Gillian Godfrey said. “You were selected for this program because of your great popular success, but sometimes today’s mainstream literary world makes a sharp distinction between literature and popular culture. Will you still be read in a hundred years?”

“I’ll settle for being read right now,” Callie Jackson said airily. “I have no illusions about literary immortality.”

“Actually, though,” Muriel Bates put in, “it’s not for us to say what reputation we might have a century from now. Did not Shakespeare write to entertain a mass audience? Was not Dickens the bestseller of his day?” This drew a smattering of supportive applause.

“Nothing more fickle than reputation, is there?” Cosmo McDougall mused. “Counselor Turnbow and I were speaking on this very subject earlier this evening, and he pointed out that everyone knows John Updike and many remember Ogden Nash. But what about Richard Armour? Totally forgotten.”

“Not totally,” Gillian Godfrey said. “He was a wonderful humorist. Wrote It All Started with Columbus.”

“Always ask a librarian,” said Callie Jackson.

“And I believe we still have some of his books in our collection.”

“Left-winger, was he?” Amos Bosworth muttered.

“Would a couple of football players volunteer to carry Professor Bosworth’s hobby horse back to the lab so we can proceed?” Cosmo McDougall said, earning him laughs from the audience and a glance of pure hatred from his colleague. “Relax, Amos. I’m only joking. The university finds a place for all strains of opinion.”

“Really?” Bosworth snapped back. “I checked the library catalog for some of our finest conservative writers and political thinkers, and what did I find?”

“A well-selected book collection, I’m sure. I hear they didn’t buy your book, but you might be pleased to know they don’t buy mine either. Which is a good indication of their taste.”

Gillian, looking a bit unnerved by the sniping, said, “Of course we’ll be glad to add Professor Bosworth’s book to our collection.” Somewhere, Stephen mused, Edie Yamamoto is cringing. “We believe in supporting faculty authors and are open to all shades of opinion on controversial issues. Now, I think we have time for some questions from the audience.”

Several people had already lined up behind a microphone set up below the stage. Stephen thought the third questioner in line, a stunning beauty in tight, low-cut jeans and belly shirt, looked familiar. Could that be Willy Ames? He almost nudged Vanessa but decided it wouldn’t be wise.

A law student engaged Turnbow on an obscure legal point from one of his novels and received a brief, jargon-free answer. An enthusiastic middle-aged lecturer asked the standard question about where the five writers’ ideas came from and got the usual trite answers. Then Willy took the mike, and things got interesting.

“Professor McDougall,” she said, “for a long time you resisted blurbing your fellow novelists’ new books, but lately you seem to be doing it more frequently.”

McDougall shrugged. “Well, some of them are friends of mine.”

“I often wonder about jacket blurbs,” Willy went on. “They aren’t compensated, are they?”

“Certainly not!” said Muriel Bates, apparently outraged.

“Not with money, anyway,” said Callie Jackson.

“I can’t imagine what you’re suggesting, Callie,” Gresham Turnbow said with heavy-handed irony. “Seriously, though, jacket comments aren’t just paybacks or tokens of friendship, at least not when I do them. They represent an honest attempt to guide my readers to a book I feel they might enjoy, and I trust the same is true when someone blurbs me.”

“Absolutely, Gresham,” said Callie Jackson.

Though the next young man in the questioners’ line was clearly impatient and Gillian Godfrey was beginning to look a bit nervous, Willy was not ready to relinquish the mike. “I’ve often wondered how sincere they are. I’ve wondered if somebody might be playing games with their jacket blurbs.”

In the audience, Stephen nudged Vanessa. “What does she know?” he said.

Bosworth was looking at McDougall poisonously but said nothing.

“You have an active imagination, young woman,” said Muriel Bates. “But who would do something like that? And what sort of game are you talking about?”

“Let’s say a writer wanted to subtly ridicule his or her fellow writers, putting the jacket blurbs in a sort of code that no one would notice from looking at one blurb but that someone might figure out if they looked at several of them together. Would any of you care to comment on that? How about you, Professor McDougall?”

Turnbow, Bates, and Jackson turned to McDougall with curiosity.

“Idea might work for fiction,” McDougall said, seeming unconcerned. “But it sounds a little far-fetched. You don’t want to be more specific, do you?”

“No, I don’t think I do,” Willy said. “But if any of you were to see me privately...” She finally relinquished the questioner’s mike with a mischievous smile, and the interest level of the proceedings dropped considerably.

It was three in the morning when Stephen Fenbush’s bedside telephone interrupted a particularly fascinating dream that he had forgotten completely by the time his hand found the receiver.

“Hello,” he said, suppressing a yawn.

“Is that Stephen Fenbush?”

“It is. I could ask you if you know what time it is, but you probably do. To whom do I have the pleasure of speaking?”

“Detective Ortiz. City police. Homicide. We’ve met before. You helped us out a little on that Anderson case.”

“So I did, but if you think I’m a gifted amateur sleuth who helps the police solve their difficult cases, I’m flattered, but believe me, I was just lucky.”

“Yes, sir. I agree. We want your help again but not to do our job for us. There was another murder on campus tonight, at that VIP guest building they have there. Qualen House?”

“I know it well.” In fact, it was where they were putting up the writers for the bestseller conference. “Who’s been murdered?”

“A faculty member, sir, man named Cosmo McDougall. We found a young woman student sitting by the body. She insists on talking to you.”

“Is her name by any chance Williametta Ames?”

“That’s her. How’d you know?”

“Lucky guess. Is she a suspect?”

“I can’t really say, but she was sitting by the body reading this weird poem off a piece of paper, making no effort to report the crime or get out of there. Her position could look better.”

“She didn’t kill anybody,” Stephen said.

“Well, whether she did or not, she’s not telling us everything she knows, and if she talks to you, she might.”

“How did McDougall die exactly?”

“Slowly. Stabbed with a knife from the Qualen House kitchen. Lots of blood.”

“Any clues?”

“Dying messages, you mean?” Ortiz said, a suggestion of irony in his tone.

“Well, Anderson did one. Sort of.”

“No such luck.”

“Still, McDougall left some clues before he was dying. Detective Ortiz, you’re going to be glad you called me.”

By the time Stephen got to Qualen House, the police were finished with Willy for the time being. They hadn’t charged her with anything, and while she was a little bit more subdued than usual, for somebody who’d been sitting in the Qualen House kitchen with a bleeding body reading something or other, she seemed remarkably calm.

“Thanks for bailing me out, Mr. Fenbush,” said Willy Ames.

“Bailing you out? You weren’t arrested and you weren’t in jail.”

“Thanks to your pull with the local police.”

“I don’t have any pull with the — why aren’t you more upset, anyway?”

“It’s deceptive,” Willy told him. “I recover fast, but before I went all girly, cried and everything. Shameful.”

“Willy, what the hell were you doing in the building, anyway?”

“I was invited. There was a post-program party, and I was invited.”

“By whom?”

“Professor Bosworth. He seemed to like what I said at the meeting.”

“Yeah, I guess he would.”

“I think I was the only student there who wasn’t walking around with hors d’oeuvre trays. Naturally, I was determined to take advantage of it, pick the brains of the bestselling writers. What an opportunity.”

“You’re lucky you weren’t murdered yourself. That stunt you pulled at the panel sounded like a threat.”

“No, I was just having fun, and it got me an invitation, didn’t it? Professor McDougall didn’t seem to mind, by the way. He thought it was funny, if anything, and he was very nice to me at the party. They all were.”

“Look, Willy, I know you’ve been over this with the police, but if you don’t mind—”

“Ask away. I want to help.”

“Why did you come to the kitchen?”

“It was like this. I was determined to stay as long as I could, not miss anything. Somehow, as the caterers packed up and left and the party was breaking up, nobody asked me to leave, so I didn’t. I hung out in the Qualen House library looking at the book collection. Then I wandered around exploring. It’s quite an interesting old building, and I thought I might run into one of the writers who were staying there.”

“All this creeping around in an old dark house didn’t seem dangerous to you?”

“Oh, you mean like the ingénue who walks into danger while everybody in the audience is saying, don’t, don’t. It wasn’t like that. I wasn’t thinking murder, and I wasn’t afraid of anybody. When I walked into the kitchen and saw him lying there in a pool of blood, I about freaked out.”

“Uh-huh. But you recovered quickly and apparently made no effort to report it to anybody.”

“I would have eventually. I mean, I would have raised the alarm immediately, but then I saw that poem lying near the body, and I had to look at it. Then a cleaning lady came through and found me and found the body and screamed and probably thought I did it. And when the cops came, I made a spectacle of myself, I have to admit, sobbing like a kid, but like I said—”

“You recover fast, got it.”

“All I wanted was to see you, Mr. Fenbush, because I thought you and you alone would understand.”

“Understand what?”

“This poem. It was printed on a sheet of white paper. As soon as I saw it, I thought it might be important. And I knew the police would snatch it away immediately, as evidence. I wanted you to have a look at it. It may be a clue, but not the kind the police would see. So I memorized it.”

“You memorized it?”

“I’m a quick study. Ask any of my teachers. I wrote it all out while I was between police grillings and waiting for you to get here. Professor McDougall’s dust-jacket quotes had a sort of code to them. I thought maybe the message by the body was following his code too, though I didn’t have time to check it out completely. Isn’t that interesting?”

“Very. So are you going to let me see it after going to all this trouble?”

She passed it over, and Stephen glanced at it. “Unsigned?”

“Yes, just like you see it.”

Stephen and Vanessa were back in the Faculty Club two days later, waiting for Edie Yamamoto to join them. Stephen had been looking forward to doing his supersleuth act, but Vanessa’s mood was putting a bit of a damper on things.

“So why did she call you?” she asked.

“I don’t know, really, but when somebody in trouble wants your help, you go, right?”

“You have to watch that girl, Stephen.”

“Oh, I watch her every chance I get.”

“You know what I mean.”

“Why? You think she’s a murderer?”

After a long pause, Vanessa said, “No,” grudgingly.

Edie arrived and the atmosphere lightened a bit. They ordered more hurriedly than usual, and the librarian asked eagerly, “So what do you have to tell us, Stephen?”

“The late Professor McDougall, a guy who for most of his life disdained giving jacket quotes, suddenly started giving them. And I figured them out.”

Vanessa couldn’t resist a dig, but it came across good-humored. “You or your student protegee?”

“We figured them out independently.”

“Didn’t put your heads together?”

“No, dam it. Look, do you want to hear this or not?”

“I do,” said Edie, “unless I decide the subplot is more interesting.”

“It’s not.” He passed them a sheet of paper with McDougall’s blurbs for the novels by Callie Jackson, Gresham Turnbow, and Muriel Bates. “Now look at all these quotes carefully. See anything unusual about them?”

“Yes,” Vanessa said. “They’re God-awful.”

“And how is that unusual for jacket blurbs?”

“Because Cosmo is supposed to have written them.”

“You’re right,” said Edie. “I can’t believe he could write this awkwardly even if he did them in a hurry. ‘Literary genius goes about its matchless business’? That’s dreadful.”

Vanessa said, “Are you telling us Cosmo didn’t write these?”

“Oh, he wrote them, all right,” Stephen said. “A major publisher couldn’t put phony quotes from a bestselling author on a book and expect to get away with it. But there’s another reason they’re so bad.”

“Tell us.”

“Spot one more feature the quotes have in common and then I will.”

“They’re all exaggerated praise,” said Vanessa.

“Undeserved,” said Edie.

“More specific than that.”

Vanessa gave him a dirty look and studied the four quotes once more. Then she brightened for an instant, quickly darkened again when she remembered how much he was annoying her, and said, “It’s the numbers! There’s a number in each quote. Six, five, four.” She paused a moment. “They’re in descending order.”

Stephen shook his head. “The order has nothing to do with it. An accident of how I arranged them. But you’re right. It’s the numbers I’m referring to.”

“There’s a message in here somewhere,” Edie said, “like he did for Amos Bosworth’s book but better hidden.”

Stephen nodded. “His messages were concealed well enough to get past whoever edits the jacket blurbs but transparent enough that somebody would eventually figure them out, especially if you put several of them together as I did and saw what they have in common. I’m told by some publishing contacts that he insisted they use his quotes word for word as he wrote them or not at all.”

“So how do we crack the code?” Vanessa said.

“If my ‘student protégée can do it, so can you.”

Vanessa glared at him. She and Edie peered at the four quotes for a few moments, until a look of exasperated understanding crossed Vanessa’s face. “Of course. You take the number mentioned in the quote and then use that to know which words to highlight. In the first one, you take every sixth word.” She took out a teacher’s ever-ready red pencil and started to work. A minute later, she handed the list of quotes back to Stephen. The messages were as follows.

On Towers of Tinsel by Callie Jackson: “Come on give me a break.”

On Under the Gavel by Gresham Turnbow: “Disbar this guy immediately.”

On Love’s Choppy Seas by Muriel Bates: “About as erotic as a route canal.”

“They get better,” said Vanessa, “but they really aren’t all that clever. Or all that scathing for that matter.”

“What’s this fourth quote you listed?” Edie asked. “There’s no number in that.”

“Well, McDougall put a joke blurb on his own jacket,” Stephen said.

“It’s an anagram,” Edie said. “Malcolm Good, USC. Cosmo McDougall.”

“You got it. Now have a look at that poem that was found by the body. Apply the code to that.”

“ ‘Cosmo McDougall must have nine lives,’ ” Edie read. “So we take every ninth word.” A moment later, she had it. “It says, ‘Somebody who could do this to his friends deserves to die badly.’ And the murderer wrote this?”

“Yes, and not on the spur of the moment. The killer wrote that before coming to the conference and had it ready to spring on McDougall.”

“All very clever, Stephen and Edie,” Vanessa pointed out, “but it doesn’t tell us who killed Cosmo. The police haven’t made an arrest, have they?”

“Yes it does, and yes, they have,” Stephen said with outrageous casualness. “Better not mention that to anybody, though, till it’s generally reported. Putting together two clues, one from the jacket blurbs and the other something that came out at the symposium the night of the murder, convinced me I knew who did it, even though there wasn’t an ounce of proof that would hold up in a court of law. When I called Detective Ortiz to tell him who it was, I expected him to laugh, but instead he asked me how I knew. They’d arrived at the same conclusion after going through McDougall’s effects and following boring old police procedure. McDougall not only praised blackmailers, he was a blackmailer. One of the people he got here for the bestsellers’ conference was really called for another reason. Anger over being subtly ridiculed in a jacket blurb wasn’t really a motive for murder, but a secret that would ruin the murderer’s reputation and career was.”

“So who was it?” Edie asked.

“First the two clues. Look at those messages in the jacket quotes. One is pretty bland and unfocussed: ‘Come on give me a break.’ Another is clever and insulting — ‘About as erotic as a route canal’ — but still relatively harmless. The third one, though, could easily be taken as a threat: ‘Disbar this guy immediately.’ A pretty serious thing for a lawyer, especially if there was some criminal activity involved that would bring an even worse penalty.”

“So from that you get Gresham Turnbow?” Vanessa said. “That’s pretty thin.”

“Ah, but my other clue was that discussion with Turnbow that McDougall alluded to. He mentioned three writers, a very odd combination that seemed to have little in common. John Updike, great American novelist, recently deceased. Ogden Nash, poet, also a radio personality and mystery-book editor, too. And the third, Richard Armour, humorist, comic historian, not as widely known as the other two. But they had one thing in common. They all wrote light verse. Like Cosmo McDougall — and like the author of that deceptively laudatory poem. Like Gresham Turnbow. Why would the two of them be discussing those three otherwise dissimilar writers in a group if they didn’t have a common interest in light verse?”

“Still pretty thin,” Vanessa said. “Lots of writers can or could write light verse.”

“Never said it was airtight. But the stuff they found in McDougall’s papers, evidence of a massive financial fraud Turnbow had been involved in, plus some forensic evidence on the knife, made the case. I understand Turnbow caved in immediately, either had a mental breakdown or started laying the groundwork for an insanity defense. He’s in custody now writing not legal briefs but poetry.”

“So really they didn’t need your brilliant deductions at all,” Vanessa said.

Stephen looked at Edie for sympathy. “Did Ellery Queen ever have to put up with this?”