This was a carbon copy, and therefore unsigned, but the smudgy type sizzled.

As Amy had said, the Pelletier archive was enormous. She and I were

facing each other across a table in the University of Chicago’s rare books room, with boxes of papers and books between us. When we’d signed in, the librarian said Pelletier must suddenly be a hot item-we were the second people asking to see the papers in the last month.

With the instincts of the born detective, Amy said, yeah, her cousin Marcus always had been a jump ahead of her, and the archivist agreed that Marcus Whitby had been looking at the boxes three weeks ago. He’d only come once, the archivist said, so whatever he wanted, he found on his first trip. We were lucky, she added, that Mike Goode, their premier processing archivist, had sorted and labeled the boxes.

Even so, we had a formidable hoard to inspect. The collection was probably a lit crit’s dream come true, but made for a detective’s nightmare. Pelletier had kept everything-bills, eviction notices, menus from memorable dinners. He thought highly enough of his historical importance that he’d made carbons of most of his own letters. Most were like this one to Calvin, long fulminations against someone or something. In the thirties and forties, the correspondence was energetic if caustic-astute observations on personalities or public events.

As time passed, though, Pelletier became more embittered and more embattled. He wrote angrily to the New York Times over the review they gave Bleak Land, to the University of Chicago for not keeping him on as a lecturer in the sixties, to his landlord for raising his rent, to the laundry for losing a shirt. Amy and I looked at each other in dismay: What had Marc found in this mass on his first pass through it?

The Herald-Star had given Pelletier a two-column obituary. I read it for biographical information. He’d been born in Lawndale on Chicago’s West Side in 1899, gone to the University of Chicago for a year, volunteered to fight in France in 1917 and had come back to join the radical labor movements sweeping Chicago and the country.

Pelletier made no secret of having been a Communist during the thirties and forties. A Tale of Two Countries was based on his fifteen months in Spain during 1936 and ‘37, where he fought with the Abraham Lincoln Brigade during the Spanish civil war. Supposedly it was filled with thinly disguised references to historical figures, including scathing portraits of Picasso and Hemingway, and it revealed the arguments about the war that took place in a Communist Party cell, each member possibly a real person Pelletier had known in his own Chicago cell.

When called to testify in front of Representative Walker Bushnell and the House Un-American Activities Committee, the committee pressed Pelletier hard to identify the characters in the book, but he refused, claiming that it was a work of fiction, and spent six months in prison for contempt of Congress. Afterward, as a blacklisted writer, he found it difficult to get his work published and wrote romances under the pen name “Rosemary Burke.” He died Thursday of pneumonia exacerbated by malnutrition at the age of seventy-eight.