The Missing Chapter

“I don’t have hard evidence that Charles Childress’s demise was anything but a suicide, and neither does Mr. Wolfe — or our client, for that matter. But I learned a long time ago that when Nero Wolfe has a conviction about something, he’s invariably right. And he is convinced that Childress was murdered.” Okay, so I was laying it on thick, but I needed to seize the offensive.

“Now, you had known Childress for several years,” I went on quickly. “Was he the type who might have killed himself?”

“Mr. Goodwin, it may surprise you to know that I am not an expert on suicidal behavior. Until now, I have never known anyone who destroyed himself — assuming of course that Charles did. As you must be aware, he was given to extreme mood swings — believe me, I saw more of them than I cared to. In the course of a few minutes, the man could go from high to low and back again. But regardless of where he was on that roller coaster of his, it was never a picnic working with the guy.”

“Was he a good writer?”

Billings twitched his head. “All depends on whom you talk to. My former boss, Horace Vinson — I suppose you’ve already met him — gave Charles higher marks than I did. And several critics around town had lower opinions of him than mine. In fairness, he did a pretty decent job of re-creating Darius Sawyer’s characters. The biggest problem I had was his plots. They were clumsy and awkward, but whenever I tried to strengthen some part of the structure, he’d throw a fit. I mean, he’d really go into a rage. I’ve dealt with some difficult writers in my ten-odd years as an editor, but Charles was the corker.” He scowled at the memory.

“What was wrong with the plots?” I asked.

“Sheesh! What wasn’t wrong with them? I don’t know if you’re familiar with whodunits, but the trick is to give each suspect — there’s usually five or six of them, maybe even seven — a solid motive for having committed the murder, or whatever the crime is. Then, you’ve also got to make sure that each of the suspects gets more or less equal play as the story unfolds. Of course it helps to strew some red herrings along the way, too. But the toughest thing is to make the puzzle hard to solve while at the same time playing fair with the reader.”

“Meaning?”

“Meaning the clues need to be there for the reader to find. They should be well-hidden — damn well-hidden — but they should be there. For one thing, Charles didn’t handle his clues well; the ones he bothered to put in at all were usually so obvious a semi-literate eight-year-old could spot them. And he normally spent all his time concentrating on one or two of the suspects and all but ignoring the others, none of whom had a very believable motive.”

“I gather you had a hard time getting him to change anything.”

Billings shook his head. “Huh — a hard time? It was damn near impossible, even after the first Barnstable book came out. At first, the reviews were mixed to mildly favorable, although the majority of the critics clobbered him for exactly the things I’d pointed out and had tried to get him to change. But he was almost as hard to deal with when we worked on the second book, and finally, I went to Horace. He promised he’d speak to Charles, get him to be a little more flexible. Horace did talk to him all right, but it didn’t do a hell of a lot of good. Charles remained convinced he was Tolstoy incarnate, or at least Balzac. He was still miserable to deal with, and his plots still had more holes than all the golf courses in Westchester combined. He went ballistic any time I suggested changes. So what happened? The second book got worse reviews than the first, with most of the criticism focused on the plot. Why was I not surprised?”

“And after all that, you still were willing to edit a third Childress book?” I asked.

“Mr. Goodwin, it wasn’t a case of being willing,” Billings said sharply. “I was Monarch’s mystery editor — that was my job. Vinson liked Charles, and his first two books sold well enough, in spite of the mixed reviews. If I wanted to stay with Monarch, and I did, those two factors left me with no options, other than to do what I could to make the Barnstable books as good as possible under the circumstances.”

“Then came the third book.”

Billings swiped at a buzzing fly and missed. “God, don’t remind me. There’s probably not much I can say that you don’t already know. Things really turned ugly between Charles and me. The less-than-rave reviews he’d gotten, combined with criticism from some of the purists who had grown up on the Sawyer books, made him paranoid and defensive. Bear in mind that Charles Childress was not a Gibraltar of stability to begin with. Are you aware that he had attempted suicide before?”

“You’ve got my attention.”