The Burglar in the Library

by Lawrence Block

“You don’t, huh?”

  “No,” she said, “I don’t. Maybe I should just shut up and go along for the ride, because you know what they say about looking gift whores in the mouth.”

  “What do they say?”

  “They say not to. But I can’t help it, Bern. You picked out Cuttleford House as a special treat for Lettice. Once she took herself out of the picture, why would you want to go there?”

  “I told you—”

  “I know what you told me, but if you need a vacation why wouldn’t you want to take it somewhere else? I just can’t keep from feeling that you’ve got a hidden agenda.”

  “A hidden agenda,” I said.

  “If I’m wrong,” she said, “just tell me once and for all, and I’ll shut up about it, I promise.”

  “I wouldn’t say hidden,” I said. “I wouldn’t call it an agenda.”

  “But there’s something, isn’t there, Bern?”

  I sighed, nodded. “There’s something.”

  “I knew it.”

  “Or maybe there’s nothing, but there’s the possibility of something. At least there was something. I’m fairly certain of that, but I don’t know if there still is. Something, I mean.”

  “Bern—”

  “Although there’d still be something, wouldn’t there? But instead of being there, it could be somewhere. Somewhere else, I mean.”

  “Bernie, those are real words you’re using, and you’re making whole sentences out of them, but—”

  “But you don’t know what I’m talking about.”

  “Right.”

  I took a deep breath. I said, “What do you know about Raymond Chandler?”

  “Raymond Chandler?”

  “Right.”

  “The mystery writer? That Raymond Chandler?”

  “That’s the one.”

  “What do I know about him? Well, I read all his books years ago. I don’t think he wrote very many of them, did he?”

  “Seven novels,” I said, “plus two dozen short stories and four or five articles.”

  “I probably missed some of the short stories,” she said, “and I don’t think I ever read any of the articles, but I’m pretty sure I read all of the books.”

  “I read everything at one time or another. The books, the short stories, the articles. And his collected correspondence, and two biographies, one by Philip Durham and one by Frank MacShane.”

  “That puts you way ahead of me, Bern.” She shrugged. “I just read the guy because I liked the books. So I don’t know a whole lot about him. Was he English or American? I don’t even know.”

  “He was born here,” I said, “in 1888. Conceived here, too, in Laramie, Wyoming, and born in Chicago. Spent his summers in Nebraska. When he was seven his parents split up and he and his mother moved to England. Then when he was twenty-three he borrowed five hundred pounds from his uncle and moved to America. He wound up in southern California, of course, and that’s where he set his stories. He was in the oil business, until he drank his way out of it. Then he tried writing.”

  “Because you can’t drink your way out of it?”

  “He’d been interested in it before, but now he really worked at it. He sold his first short story to Black Mask in 1933, and published his first novel in 1939.”

  “The Long Sleep.”

  “The Big Sleep,” I said. “You’re mixing it up with the sixth novel, The Long Goodbye. It’s a natural mistake. Both of the titles are euphemisms for death.”

  “Right.”

  “His last years weren’t much fun,” I went on. “His wife died in 1954 and he was never the same after that. He wrote a seventh novel, Playback, that wasn’t very good, and the opening chapters of an eighth that would have been even worse if he’d finished it. But he didn’t. In March of 1959 he said his own long goodbye and took his own big sleep.”

  “But his books live on.”

  “They certainly do. They’re all in print, and his place in the crime fiction pantheon is unchallenged. You don’t even have to be a mystery fan to like Chandler. ‘I never read mysteries,’ you’ll hear people say, ‘except for Raymond Chandler, of course. I adore Chandler.’” I crumpled a sheet of paper and threw it to Raffles. “Sometimes,” I said, “they’ll say that, and it turns out they’re adoring him sight unseen, because they haven’t really read him at all.”

  “I guess that’s real literary success,” she said. “When you’ve got devoted fans who haven’t even read you.”

  “You can’t beat it,” I agreed. “Anyway, that’s Raymond Chandler. There’s another writer who gets mentioned in the same breath with him, and I know you’ve read his stuff. Hammett.”

  “Dashiell Hammett? Of course I’ve read him, Bern. He didn’t write very much either, did he?”

  “Five novels and around sixty short stories. He’d pretty much stopped writing by the time Chandler had his first story published. His health was never good, and his last years couldn’t have been much more fun than Chandler’s.”

  “When did he die?”

  “In 1961. Like Chandler, his work lives on. They teach his books in college courses. You can probably buy Cliff’s Notes for The Maltese Falcon. How’s that for fame?”

  “Not bad.”

  “Hammett and Chandler, Chandler and Hammett. The two of them are considered the founders of hardboiled crime fiction. There were other writers who got there first, like Carroll John Daly, but hardly anybody reads them anymore. Hammett and Chandler were the cream of the crop, and they’re the ones who get the credit.”

  “Were they great friends, Bern?”

  “They only met once,” I said. “In 1936, if I remember it correctly. Ten Black Mask regulars got together for dinner in L.A. Chandler lived out there, and Hammett was working in Hollywood at the time. Norbert Davis and Horace McCoy were there, too, and Todhunter Ballard, and five other writers I don’t know much about.”

  “I don’t know anything about the ones you just mentioned.”

  “Well, Ballard wrote a lot of westerns, and I think he was distantly related to Rex Stout. Horace McCoy wrote They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? I forget what Norbert Davis wrote. Stories for Black Mask, I guess.”

  “And that’s the only time they met?”

  “That’s what everybody says.”

  “Oh?”

  “Every biography of either of the two of them mentions that meeting. They had a photo taken of the group, to send to the editor of Black Mask back in New York.” I went over to the Biography section and came back with Shadow Man, Richard Layman’s life of Hammett, and flipped through it to the photos. “Here we go. That’s Chandler with the pipe. And that’s Hammett.”

  “It looks as though they’re staring at each other.”

  “Maybe. It’s hard to tell.”

  “Did they like each other, Bern?”

  “That’s also hard to tell. Years later Chandler wrote a letter in which he recalled the meeting. He remembered Hammett as nice-looking, tall, quiet, gray-haired, and with a fearful capacity for Scotch.”

  “Just like me.”

  “Well, you’re nice-looking,” I agreed. “I don’t know about tall.”

  She glowered at me. Carolyn can stand six feet tall, but only if she happens to be wearing twelve-inch heels. “I’m not quiet or gray-haired, either,” she said. “I was referring to the fearful capacity for Scotch.”

  “Oh.”

  “Is that all Chandler had to say about him?”

  “He thought a lot of him as a writer.” I flipped pages, found the part I was looking for. I read: “‘Hammett took murder out of the Venetian vase and dropped it into the alley; it doesn’t have to stay there forever, but it looked like a good idea to get as far as possible from Emily Post’s idea of how a well-bred debutante gnaws a chicken wing. Hammett wrote for people with a sharp, aggressive attitude to life. They were not afraid of the seamy side of things; they lived there. Violence did not dismay them; it was right down their street. Hammett gave murder back to t
he kind of people who 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

  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 ou
t 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?”