Plot It Yourself

He went to the third sheet. “Another verbal one. Alice Porter has this: ‘Barely had she touched him when he felt his heart pounding.’ And this: ‘Night had barely fallen by the time she reached the door and got out her key.’ And this: ‘Was there still a chance? Barely a chance?’ Simon Jacobs used ‘barely’ four times, in similar constructions, and Jane Ogilvy three times.”

“I’m sold,” I averred. “Coincidence is out.”

“But there are two others. One is punctuation. They are all fond of semicolons and use them where most people would prefer a comma or a dash. The other is more subtle but to me the most conclusive. A clever man might successfully disguise every element of his style but one-the paragraphing. Diction and syntax may be determined and controlled by rational processes in full consciousness, but paragraphing-the decision whether to take short hops or long ones, whether to hop in the middle of a thought or action or finish it first-that comes from instinct, from the depths of personality. I will concede the possibility that the verbal similarities, and even the punctuation, could be coincidence, though it is highly improbable; but not the paragraphing. These three stories were paragraphed by the same person.”

“Plot it yourself,” I said.

“What?”

“Nothing. The title of a piece I happened to read in the Times Book Review just popped up. It was about the idea that a novelist should just create his characters and let them go ahead and develop the action and the plot. This guy was dead against it. He claimed you should plot it yourself. I was thinking that a detective working on a case can’t plot it himself. It has already been plotted. Look at this. This is now a totally different animal. One thing: with all those similarities, why hasn’t anyone noticed it?”

“Probably because no one has ever had the three manuscripts together and compared them. Until that committee was formed they were in different hands.”

I returned to my desk and sat. “Okay. Congratulations. So I’ll have to rearrange my mind. I suppose you already have.”

“No. I hadn’t even arranged it.”

I glanced up at the clock. “Quarter past eleven. Harvey might be home. Do you want to swagger?”

“No. I’m tired. I want to sleep. There’s no hurry.” He pushed his chair back and got to his feet.