“As I said on the telephone earlier today, Mr. Wolfe has been engaged by someone who believes Charles Childress was murdered. And he agrees with—”
“Where’s the evidence?” Billings growled. “And what do the police think? The papers haven’t printed a single word about murder. Nothing — not one damned word.”
“Interruptions can come from both sides of a closed door,” I responded calmly. “On the phone, you told me how busy you are, and I don’t doubt that for a minute. But this will go much faster if you allow me to complete the sentences I start.”
He twitched a hand irritably. “Okay, go on, go on.”
“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.”
“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.