Plot It Yourself

“Certainly,” Harvey agreed. “That was the pattern. The third one, Jane Ogilvy, followed it exactly, the only difference being that she had a stroke of luck. Whatever plan she had for discovery of the manuscript in Marjorie Lippin’s home, she didn’t have to use it, for Mrs Lippin conveniently died. Again, with Kenneth Rennert, the only difference was the way the manuscript was found.”

He stopped to cover his mouth with his palm, and a noise came, too feeble to be called a belch. “Sausage for breakfast,” he said, for the record. “I shouldn’t. That’s how it stood when this committee had its first meeting. At the NAAD council meeting a prominent novelist had said that he had a new book scheduled for early fall and he hoped to God it would be a flop, and nobody laughed. At the first meeting of this committee Gerald Knapp, president of Knapp and Bowen- How did you put it, Mr Knapp?”

Knapp passed his tongue over his lips. “I said that it hasn’t hit us yet, but we have three novels on the bestseller list, and we hate to open our mail.”

“So that’s the situation,” Harvey told Wolfe. “And now Alice Porter is repeating. Something has to be done. It has to be stopped. About a dozen lawyers have been consulted, authors’ and publishers’ lawyers, and none of them has an idea that is worth a damn. Except one maybe-the one who suggested that we put it up to you. Can you stop it?”

Wolfe shook his head. “You don’t mean that, Mr Harvey.”

“I don’t mean what?”

“That question. If you expect me to say no, you wouldn’t have come. If you expect me to say yes, you must think me a swaggerer, and again you wouldn’t have come. I certainly wouldn’t undertake to make it impossible for anyone ever again to extort money from an author by the stratagem you have described.”

“We wouldn’t expect you to.”

“Then what would you expect?”

“We would expect you to do something about this situation that would make us pay your bill not only because we had to but also because we felt that you had earned it and we had got our money’s worth.”

Wolfe nodded. “That’s more like it. That was phrased as might be expected from the author of Why the Gods Laugh, which I have just read. I had been thinking that you write better than you talk, but you put that well because you had been challenged. Do you want to hire me on those terms?”

Harvey looked at Gerald Knapp, and then at Dexter. They looked at each other. Reuben Imhof asked Wolfe, “Could you give us some idea of how you would go about it and what your fee would be?”