The Burglar in the Library

CHAPTER Four

Chandler 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, and I’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 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 around that 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 book trade 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 Ross’s credibility, doesn’t it, Bern?”

“I’d say so. I checked the Times Index and found out a little more about Fontenoy. He was married to one of the Mellon heirs, and he had some family money of his own. He backed a few Broadway shows, and was a fairly substantial supporter of leftist causes in the years immediately preceding the war.”

“That would connect him to Hellman. The theater and the politics.”

“It would certainly explain how they happened to know each other. But none of that matters. The real question is what happened to the book.”

“The Big Sleep.”

“Right. Here’s what I think happened. Chandler, tight as a tick, whipped out the book, wrote something heartfelt, and presented it to Hammett. Hammett, whom everybody describes as an extremely polite man, took it as if it were the key to the Kingdom of Heaven. Then Chandler went home with the Coxes, and Hammett and Hellman went back to Hardscrabble Farm, or drove all the way home to New York.”

“And the book stayed behind.”

“That’s my guess.”

“Why, Bern? Wouldn’t Hammett take it with him?”

“He might,” I said, “if he thought of it. By the time he left Cuttleford House, he was probably too drunk to remember or too hungover to care.” I held out my hands. “Look, I can’t prove any of this. Maybe he took it home with him, read a couple of chapters, and tossed it in the trash. Maybe he lent it to somebody who passed it on to somebody else who gave it to the church rummage sale. Maybe it’s rotting away in somebody’s basement or attic even as we speak.”

“But you don’t think so.”

“No, I don’t. I think he left it on a table in Cuttleford House, accidentally or on purpose, and I think one of the maids stuck it on a shelf in the library. They’ve got a classic formal library-there’s a photograph of it in the brochure. Shelves clear up to the twelve-foot ceiling.”

“And that’s where you think it is.”

“I think it might be. Oh, a lot of people have been in that house since then. Monks, drunks, workmen, guests. Any one of them could have picked up The Big Sleep and walked off with it.”

“Bernie, it’s over fifty years.”

“I know.”

“I don’t suppose any of them are still alive, are they? I know Hammett and Chandler aren’t, or Lillian Hellman. What about Coxe and Ross?”

“Gone.”

“And Fontenoy and his wife?”

“Long gone, and I don’t know what became of their children.”

“Over fifty years. How could the book still be there?”

“The house is still there. And so’s the library. I saw the photo in the brochure, and those shelves are chock-full of books, and I don’t think the Eglantines trucked them in by the pound to make a decorating statement. I think they’ve been there forever.”

“And somewhere, tucked away on some high shelf-”

“The Big Sleep,” I said. “Signed by Raymond Chandler, and inscribed to Dashiell Hammett. Sitting there, just waiting to be found.”

“I’ve been thinking,” she said, a few hours later at the Bum Rap. “About that book.”

“I can understand that. I’ve been thinking about it myself for months now.”

“Suppose it’s actually there,” she said, “and suppose you actually find it, which would take another miracle all by itself.”

“So?”

“So is it worth it? Aside from the fact that you’re obsessed, and it’s hard to put a dollar value on an obsession. But in terms of actual dollars and cents-”

“What’s it worth?”

“Right.”

I didn’t have to think. I’d worked it out often enough over the months.

“The Big Sleep is Chandler ’s scarcest book,” I said. “A first-edition copy in very fine condition is legitimately rare. With a dust jacket, the jacket also in top condition, you’ve got something worth in the neighborhood of five thousand dollars.”

“That much, huh?”

“But this one’s signed,” I said. “With most modern novels, an author’s signature will boost the price by ten or twenty percent. But it’s different with Chandler.”

“It is?”

I nodded. “He didn’t sign a lot of books. Actually, nobody did back then, not the way they do now. Nowadays just about everybody with a book out goes traipsing around the country, sitting in bookstores and signing copies for all comers.”

“Ed McBain signed his new book for me,” she said. “I told you about that, didn’t I?”

“Repeatedly.”

“Well, it was an exciting day for me, Bern. He’s one of my favorite writers.”

“One of mine, too.”

“Whenever I read one of his Eighty-seventh Precinct books,” she said, “I wind up looking at cops in a new light. I see them as real human beings, sensitive and vulnerable and, well, human.”

“That’s how he portrays them.”

“Right. And then Ray Kirschmann walks in the door and drives me right straight back to reality. I’ll tell you, I like Ed McBain’s fantasy world a whole lot better, and it was a thrill to meet him in person. That book’s one of my proudest possessions.”

“I know that, but you’re not the only person he signed a book for. He’s signed thousands of books, and so have most of the writers around today. Back in Hammett and Chandler ’s time, authors just signed books for their friends. And Chandler didn’t even do that.”

“He didn’t?”

“Not often. If you were a friend of his he might give you a book, but he wouldn’t sign it unless you made a point of asking him. So a genuine Raymond Chandler signature is valuable in its own right. On one of the later, more common books, it might increase the value from a few hundred dollars to a couple of thousand. On The Big Sleep, it could double the value.”

“So we’re up to ten grand.”

“And we’re not done yet. If Ross is telling the truth, Chandler didn’t just sign his name on Hammett’s copy. He inscribed it personally to Hammett.”

“That makes a difference?”

“It’s a funny thing with inscriptions,” I said. “If the person it’s inscribed to is just Joe Schmo, the book tends to be a little less desirable than if it’s just signed.”

“Why’s that, Bern?”

“Well, think about it,” I said. “If you were a collector, would you want a book personally inscribed to somebody that nobody ever heard of? Or would you be happier with a simple signature?”

“I don’t think I’d care one way or the other.”

“You’re not a collector. Collectors care.” I thought of some of my more idiosyncratic customers. “About everything,” I said. “Believe me.”

“I believe you, Bern. How about a copy that’s inscribed to Sid Schmo? That’s Joe’s famous brother.”

“Now you’re talking. As soon as the person named in the inscription is prominent, the book becomes an association copy.”

“And that’s good?”

“It’s not bad,” I said. “Just how good it is depends on who the person is, and the nature of his or her relationship to the author. A book inscribed by Raymond Chandler to Dashiell Hammett would have to be the ultimate association copy in American crime fiction.”

“Bottom-line it for me, Bern.”

“Assuming near-mint condition, for the book and dust jacket, and assuming the handwriting is verifiably Chandler ’s-”

“Assume everything, Bern. Let’s hear a number.”

“This is just a ballpark figure, remember. We’re talking about a unique item, so who can say what it would bring?”

“Bernie-”

“Say twenty-five.”

“Twenty-five?”

“That’s ballpark.”

“Twenty-five thousand.”

I nodded.

“Dollars.”

I nodded again.

“And what percentage of that could you fence it for?”

“You wouldn’t need a fence,” I said. “Because no one would have reported it stolen, because who even knows it exists? You could walk up to any of the top dealers and put it on the table.”

“And when they asked where you got it?”

“You picked it up at a garage sale or found it on the two-for-a-quarter shelf at a thrift shop. Hell, I’m a book dealer. I could say it came in at the bottom of a carton of junk, and I assumed it was a book club reprint until I took a good look at it. You wouldn’t even have to say how it came into your hands. You could just smile wisely and keep your mouth shut.”

“So you could wind up with the whole twenty-five thousand.”

“Or more, if you stuck it in a Sotheby’s auction and two fanatics both decided they had to have it.”

“Wow.”

“But there’s no guarantee it ever existed in the first place,” I said, “and even if it did it probably disappeared long ago. Or it is still there, for all the good it does us, because it’s hidden away and you could go through the house from top to bottom and never find it.”

“We’ve got to look, Bern.”

“That’s what I figured.”

“Twenty-five grand.”

“It could be a lot less, you know. Maybe the dust jacket’s gone. Maybe the spine is faded. Maybe the pages are dog-eared. Maybe there’s insect damage.”

“Maybe a kid came along and colored in all the O’s,” she said. “Maybe a mad botanist pressed leaves between the pages. The hell with all that. We’ve got to take a shot at it, Bern.” She looked at me. “We’d never forgive ourselves if we didn’t.”