Plot It Yourself

Harvey upturned a palm. “That’s the meat of it. I may say that I am convinced, and so is everyone who knows her, that Ellen Sturdevant had never seen that typescript before. It was a plant. The case never went to trial. It was settled out of court. Mrs Sturdevant paid Alice Porter eighty-five thousand dollars.”

Wolfe grunted. “There’s nothing I could do about it now.”

“We know you can’t. We don’t expect you to. But that’s only the beginning.” Harvey looked at the second sheet of paper. “In January 1956, Title House published Hold Fast to All I Give You, a novel by Richard Echols. Will you tell him about it, Mr Dexter? Briefly?”

Thomas Dexter passed a hand over his gray hair. “I’ll make it as brief as I can,” he said. “It’s a long story. The publication date was January 19th. Within a month we were shipping five thousand a week. By the end of April nine thousand a week. On May 6th we got a letter from a man named Simon Jacobs. It stated that in February 1954 he had sent the manuscript of a novelette he had written, entitled “What’s Mine Is Yours,’ to the literary agency of Norris and Baum. Norris and Baum had been Echols’s agent for years. Jacob enclosed a photostat of a letter he had received from Norris and Baum, dated March 26th, 1954, returning the manuscript and saying that they couldn’t take on any new clients. The letter mentioned the title of the manuscript, ‘What’s Mine Is Yours.’ It was bona fide; there was a copy of it in Norris and Baum’s files; but no one there could remember anything about it. More than two years had passed, and they get a great many unsolicited manuscripts.”