The Missing Chapter

“Actually, he did talk about it once, maybe to get sympathy, although I know that sounds cynical — in fact, I don’t like hearing myself say it. Anyway, some years back, before I’d met him, he apparently got depressed when a manuscript of his for a big novel was rejected, and he turned on the gas in his apartment.”

“He told you this?”

Billings leaned back and put his hands behind his head. “Yeah, he did. And I couldn’t think of a damn thing to say. I remember that after he told me about it, we sat in my office — that was when I was still over at Monarch — looking at each other like two stupes. Hell, I don’t think either of us said a word for five minutes. But you know, I never felt closer to the guy than I did that day.”

“That feeling obviously didn’t last for long.”

“No. Charles was always furious with me about something. He didn’t take criticism well, and he accused me more than once of, to use his words, ‘trying to turn my book into your book.’ It got so that I found that I was even arguing with myself over every change I made in his work. I spent far too much time trying to figure out how he’d react to every change I made, and I don’t have to tell you that’s not a great way to edit a manuscript.”

“Maybe he was doing it intentionally, to keep you from fiddling with his writing,” I suggested.

He turned his palms up. “I don’t believe Charles was that calculating. He honestly felt everything he wrote was without fault, and that an editor’s role was simply to catch minor stuff — typos, punctuation errors, that sort of thing. He was stunned when the reviews of his first Barnstable book weren’t all paeans to his towering talent.” He grimaced.

“And you mentioned criticism from some of the purists. What about that?”

“Do you know about the Barnstable clubs?” The phone rang. Billings ignored it.

“Just that they exist. Something to do with the acronym PROBE, aren’t they?”

“Yeah. Standing for, if you can believe it, ‘Passionate Roster of Orville Barnstable Enthusiasts.’ Apparently, readers took to Orville Barnstable almost from the start. After Darius Sawyer wrote his first three or four books, so I’ve been told, this cult following sprang up. All over the country, and in Canada, too, Barnstable clubs were formed. ‘Posses’ is what the local chapters call themselves, and a newsletter was started out in California that had — and still has — a national mailing list. These people are as fervent as the Sherlockians; they know every detail about the stories, every idiosyncrasy about Barnstable and the other characters in the series. I know — I’ve given some speeches to a local chapter here, and the one in Philadelphia, too.

“Anyway, the clubs themselves on the whole were pretty kind to Charles — they were mainly delighted to have new Barnstable stories. And Charles, too, spoke to the local chapters; he was like a hero to them, and of course he liked that — who wouldn’t? But he also got a lot of mail from individuals, not necessarily PROBE members, and some of it was on the nasty side. You know, in preparation to edit Charles’s books, I read most of the ones Sawyer wrote — they all were published before I joined Monarch. I immersed myself in them and took a bookful of notes. But as well as I thought I knew the series, these people pounced on all sorts of minuscule inconsistencies in Charles’s books. And some of them berated him for no other reason than because he had the effrontery to add to what they saw as a sacred canon.”

“Did all this bother him?” I asked.

“Hell yes, it did. He’d pop his cork and fire off angry replies until finally, I just quit forwarding correspondence to him unless it was favorable.”

“Pretty thin-skinned. Did any of these letter-writers threaten Childress?”

“Not that I’m aware of. They were purists, but they weren’t that hostile.”

“As far as you know, did anyone else ever threaten him?”

Billings leaned back and smirked. “No, Mr. Goodwin. I’m afraid that you and Nero Wolfe are really going to have to pull a rabbit, or at least a hamster, out of a hat this time to construct a halfway-believable murder scenario.”

I smiled benignly. “In the years that you knew Childress, did anything unusual happen to him? A personal crisis, a trauma of any kind?”

“You really are reaching, aren’t you? Frankly, if you were hooked up with anybody except Wolfe, I’d ask you to get the hell out of here, but even I make allowances for genius, which is what I understand your boss claims to be. As far as personal crises, Charles always seemed to be immersed in one of his own making. Hell, as I’m sure you know, just in the last few weeks he had feuded in print with me, with his agent, and with that popinjay who masquerades as a book reviewer for the Gazette.”