Here are the 409th and 410th “first stories” to be published by Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine... The two stories were submitted together, and we thought both worthy of publication. So once again we give you a double debut, back to back, in the same issue. And this time, while the stories are completely different, they have a common thread: both are academic in flavor and locale.
The author, Kay Nolte Smith, has a “divided career”: she is an actress (her professional name in the theater is Kay Gillian) and she is a writer. Until now she has had only nonfiction published — articles chiefly in the field of esthetics. She has been “an avid fan of mystery fiction for years, because it is the one category of literature in which two crucial elements — plot and ingenuity — are still considered crucial”...
There was no need to wait another minute. His afternoon class had seemed to take place in slow motion, and then the drive home from the college had been prolonged by a wait at the liquor store; but all that was behind him now, while in front of him was a tall drink and a weekend in which to savor the magazine.
He opened the magazine, thinking that millions of copies were spreading across the country — that hundreds would reach the college alone — and found the article. He stared incredulously at a color photograph of himself that filled an entire page. The picture had been taken on the patio, seated just as he was now, and shot from such an angle that his figure, short and plump in actuality, seemed to dominate the house and the grounds. It was only when his breath returned that he realized how great was his relief. A smile inflated his pink round cheeks and his eyes, imprisoned in cages of tiny lines, shone for a moment like blue beads.
He looked, finally, at the page that faced his photograph and read the title: “A Visit with Jasper Kryler’s Son.” He read the subtitle: “As youth discovers the literary lion of the ’30s, his son reminisces.” Everything drained from his smile, leaving only the shape. He took a long drink and began warily to scan the text.
The first paragraph described him as a Professor of Creative Writing at Bentham College, appointed on the publication of his memoir about his famous father. He was relieved that neither his own age nor that of the memoir was given; it had appeared twelve years before, when he was still in his thirties, and was his only published book. He never could think of it without remembering his father’s agent, who had edited the memoir, insisting on a virtual rewrite; his mouth tightened, but he reminded himself that the agent was now dead, and he smiled.
He turned back to the text, to a description of the town of Bentham and of “the handsome house in the New England hills where Jasper Kryler lived until his death.” There was a discussion of the new generation of college students who formed “the Kryler cult,” but there was no mention of his own classes so he hurried on, skimming through the story of his father’s career: the early struggle and the escapades in Paris, the war years, the writing of the trilogy, the Nobel Prize, and the fatal solo flight across the mountains. Exit the Old Man, he thought impatiently, turning the page. But the article had ended. He had been quoted less than a dozen times, and always on the subject of his father’s life. The quotation marks trailed through the text like ants.
He had known, of course, that he was being interviewed because he was Jasper Kryler, Jr. But still, he thought, the familiar phrase locking into place in his mind, serving as a bar to its own completion. He recalled the interview: the excellent lunch he had provided, the description he had given of his classes, and the book reviews he had written. Why had none of that been mentioned?
The answer sidled into his awareness. He drained his drink and flung his glass across the patio. It landed with a thud, intact, reminding him that when the Old Man had thrown glasses around, they had shattered with a splendid ring.
The front doorbell rang loudly. Although he was not expecting anyone, he decided that one of his colleagues must have seen the magazine. He thought of the amused tolerance with which those colleagues treated him; he had counted on the article to conjure respect from their faces, but now he felt paralyzed, unable to answer the door. He forced his legs to move, reminding himself that the article was a glowing tribute to the name of Kryler.
A young man stood on the steps, clutching a package. He wasn’t one of the Bentham students, although he was dressed like many of them. A ragged poncho hung on his tall bony frame and his feet were bare. His face seemed bare, too, an expressionless canvas framed by long black hair.
“Yes?” said Jasper guardedly.
“I’ve got to talk to you. You’re the only man I can talk to.”
“Oh? About what?”
“Literature.”
Jasper hesitated. “Come in.”
Seated in the living room, the young man stared at its Art Deco furnishings in silence. “Now then,” Jasper smiled, “why am I the only man to talk to?”
“Because you’re his son. You sure don’t look it, though.”
Jasper shifted in his chair but the young man went on, his pale eyes transfixed by space. “I read his stuff two years ago and it changed everything for me. Before that I didn’t know who I was. He made me want to write. So I did. This book.” He held out the package he had been clutching. “You’ve got to read it.”
“If you want literary criticism, enroll in one of my classes.”
The young man rose and came closer. “You’ve got to read it. It’s like one of his. That’s why I brought it to you. I couldn’t tell anybody else about it, they’d laugh. I saved it for you.”
“Who are you? Did someone send you?”
The young man shook his head, puzzled. “Nobody even knows I was writing it. If people asked me what I was doing. I’d move on to some other place.”
“What place? Where are you from?”
“Oh, all over,” said the young man vaguely. “L.A., Chicago, New Mexico, New York for a while. Sometimes you find a group, but it’s better alone. You take a job, maybe, and then you move on. All you want to do is write. Like him.”
“And what makes you think I would care?”
“Well, aren’t you his son?”
Jasper rose, a hard red circle blooming on each of his cheeks. “I think you had better leave. Now.”
“Sure,” said the young man amiably. “I’ll stay away till you’ve read it.” He put down the package carefully. “I’ll be back soon.” He walked serenely to the hall, and then the front door clicked behind him.
“Of all the bloody nerve!” Jasper muttered. “Walking in as if he owned the place.” Slivers of admiration sneaked into his anger and fed it. He thought of throwing-out the package, and then he thought of something more satisfying: the look that would twist the young man’s face when he heard that his book was bad.
Smiling, Jasper carried the package into the study, switched on the reading light, and took out his gold-rimmed glasses. He unwrapped the manuscript, which was not typed but neatly hand-printed. The title page read: Pursuit of the Hunter by Luke Blount.
When he reached the end of Chapter One, his smile had faded; when he finally turned the last page his mouth had become a taut seam. Despite his efforts to prevent it, the thought formed in his mind: the boy had written a Kryler book. The sentences were short and punchy; the hero was tough and sardonic; the story was filled with action and ended in defeat. If it weren’t contemporary, Jasper thought, it could have been written by the Old Man.
He turned back to the title page: “by Luke Blount.” By a nobody, he told himself, but he knew that the critics could turn Blount into a somebody; they could hail him as a hero who had reconciled the literary past and future. Jasper closed his eyes. Headlines swam into his mind: “Kryler Redivivus”... “Kryler’s New Heir”... Luke Blount appeared, and then the Old Man; their figures merged into one huge image. He willed it to topple.
He opened his eyes hastily. The room was quiet, unchanged, reassuring. A smile curled in one corner of his mouth. He had been assuming, he realized, that Pursuit of the Hunter would be published — but wasn’t he the one to say whether that would happen? He began to compose the phrases with which he would send Luke Blount away.
But the phrases died before his memory of the young man’s confidence, and the resentment which it evoked. Then everything died in the presence of a new fear: Blount, Jasper realized, could take the manuscript to someone else, who might help him find a publisher. And word could get out that Kryler’s own son had discouraged the author.
He drummed his fingers on the manuscript. To be or not to be? he thought, finding it unjust that he was confronted by such a choice. There would be no choice to make, he thought bitterly, if he had written the book himself. If Pursuit of the Hunter were by Jasper Kryler, Jr...
He sat up slowly, visualizing the reviews: “Kryler Is Dead, Long Live Kryler!” — and surrendering completely to the fantasy, to the feeling of standing at some high podium with ant hills of crowds below him.
He looked down. There was Blount’s manuscript in his lap.
It was some moments before he realized that he was thinking of murder, and he waited for the shock that he ought to feel. The shock was that he didn’t feel it. “That’s because I don’t mean it,” he said aloud, quickly, but he got up and began to pace.
Of course, he thought, if Blount really was a loner, a drifter, there would be no one to inquire after him or to care if he was missing...
He paused at his desk and began to doodle on a pad. The scribbles reflected his thoughts, he decided; they were idle and abstract. Impractical.
He sighed and moved to the windows, pulling aside the drapes. It was dawn. Unwilling to leave the room and take up the normal business of a Saturday morning, he stared restlessly at the lawns and gardens. Then his gaze was caught by a strange object near the potting shed. At first he thought it was a log, then he saw that it was someone sleeping — Luke Blount. He began to pace the room again, more slowly.
Two hours later he walked, out and shook the sleeper. “Wake up and come in, Luke,” he said. “Have breakfast and tell me more about yourself.”
Two years later Pursuit of the Hunter by Jasper Kryler, Jr. was published.
Several months after Luke’s visit Jasper had taken out the manuscript, made a few minor changes, and then begun slowly to type it, putting out word at the college that he was writing a novel. He had decided against taking it to a literary agent, and had approached a new aggressive publishing firm that responded eagerly to the Kryler name, promising him an intensive promotion.
Eventually a clipping bureau had begun to send him sentences and paragraphs about Jasper Kryler, Jr. and the book that would be published in the spring. He had appeared on several television talk shows, and had been invited to a party at which his fellow guests were important citizens of the literary world. It had seemed to him that each of these events was the turning of more and more eyes toward himself; he began to feel that he moved in a spotlight composed of people’s glances.
In the Sunday book section of the country’s leading newspaper, Pursuit of the Hunter was reviewed by a famous novelist. The review was entitled “Dry Sawdust Off the Old Block.”
An influential literary magazine dismissed the book as “a puerile pastiche of Kryler, Sr.’s works.” A Los Angeles review declared: “It Doesn’t Run in the Family.”
Jasper saw advance copies of some of the reviews at his publisher’s. It took him some time to read them, for the words kept jumping in rhythm with his pulse. When he had finished, he turned and denounced the publisher for promoting the book so widely and exploiting the Kryler name.
That night, alone in his study, he reread Pursuit of the Hunter and discovered that he had no opinion of it. He strained to recapture his former view; he even tried to feel that the critics were right, but his mind was like a heavy ball of dough.
The ball began to swell with the pressure of a thought: he had believed the book was good, good enough to bear his name. He had called himself a literary critic; what was he to call himself now?
He shoved the question back down into silence, by means of hurling the book across the room. He stared at it and whispered, “But I didn’t do it.”
When the first of the reviews appeared in print, he stayed away from the college for two days, phoning in to say that he was ill. But the secretary’s voice held a note of amusement and he decided it would look better if he went in. Several of his colleagues made dry remarks and his students gleefully asked him pointed questions about Pursuit of the Hunter. By the end of the week even the most casual glance seemed to him a beacon of contempt. “But I didn’t do it,” he muttered as he walked away from people.
The clipping bureau sent him copies of new reviews, several of which were favorable. Pursuit of the Hunter was equated with the best of Kryler, Sr.’s work by a weekly Vermont newspaper, and a sportsmen’s journal recommended the book as good reading on a camping trip.
Jasper was certain that his colleagues had planted the reviews to humiliate him, and he refused to leave the house again.
He drank steadily, but the liquor seemed to settle in his stomach, bypassing his mind. He sat for hours before the television set, waiting for a torpor that it did not induce. One night he was watching a talk show on which he had appeared a month before. The host and a guest were discussing the upcoming Father’s Day. “And then,” said the host, “there are kids who want to grow up and be exactly like dad. I think it’s called the Kryler complex.” The studio audience chuckled.
“But I didn’t do it!” Jasper cried.
Into his mind, like a cooling salve, crept the memory of the thing he had done.
Bentham’s Chief of Police was getting ready to leave the station after a long day when the desk sergeant came into his office.
“Sorry to hold you up,” said the sergeant, “but there’s a guy out here who says he’s got to talk to the man in charge. He’s from the college, name of Kryler, and he’s acting strange.”
“Kryler?” said the Chief. “I used to know his family a bit. Read most of his dad’s books.”
“Shall I bring him in?” asked the sergeant. Chief Corey nodded.
A short pudgy man was then ushered into his office. “I want to prove I didn’t do it,” he said, sinking into a chair.
Half an hour later Chief Corey was frowning deeply over a story he had extracted with some difficulty. “Now let’s see if I’ve got this straight. You claim that two years ago you killed a fellow named Luke Blount. You don’t know where he came from, because he had no family and just drifted around the country. You don’t know where his body is, because after you poisoned him with weed killer you put him in the potting shed and set fire to it, and the next day you broke up what remained of the body and scattered it in the weekly garbage, which was hauled away. Then you got some people to clean up after the fire and had a new potting shed built on the same spot.”
“Yes,” said the little man.
The Chief frowned even more deeply and consulted his notes once more. “Then what is it you want to prove that you didn’t do?”
“I didn’t write the book. Pursuit of the Hunter — I didn’t write it! Luke Blount did, and he brought it to me, but I killed him and stole it!”
Chief Corey’s eyebrows shot up. “You mean your book that just came out? You claim somebody else wrote it?”
The visitor nodded.
The Chief’s lips began to quiver, and he bit them. “Professor,” he said finally, “my oldest boy tells me that people don’t like your book, and I bet that’s rough on you. I bet you wish you hadn’t written it. But you can’t come in here with a story like that and expect me to take it seriously. Confessing to theft and murder just so people won’t think you wrote a bad book?”
“But I didn’t!” The little man rose and looked off into space, as if he were addressing a crowd. “People have to realize. I didn’t write the book at all. I did something much more difficult. I planned and executed a murder.” His eyes darted back to the Chief. “So you’ve got to prove it.”
“Now how am I going to do that?” Chief Corey stifled a laugh. “The next time you kill somebody, better leave some evidence lying around. Especially the body.”
“You can make inquiries, can’t you? Luke Blount, he’s got to be missing from somewhere!”
“Sure,” grinned the Chief. “But where?” Suddenly he snapped his fingers. “I thought that name sounded kind of familiar. You made that up out of your dad’s books! I remember he had a fellow called Luke Horn, I liked him a lot, and then there was a somebody Blount, Harold or Harley, I think.” He looked up at his visitor chidingly. “Now, Professor, couldn’t you make up something more original than that?”
The little man’s eyes closed, as if an inner weight had pulled them shut.
“I’ll tell you what,” said the Chief genially, patting him on the shoulder. “We’ll just say that you committed the perfect crime. Okay?”
When the desk sergeant had shown him out, the little man stood for some time on the steps. Then he moved uncertainly up the street. He thought he saw one of his colleages approaching and turned aside hastily, pretending to check his reflection in a store window. But dusk had fallen, the light was gone, and there was no reflection to be seen.