Pelletier wrote one novel before A Tale of Two Countries and two in the decade after. All four were published to critical and commercial acclaim, although the reviewers all agreed Two Countries was his masterwork. After that, there’d been a gap of over ten years before he finished Bleak Land, which he apparently had shamed Calvin into buying, since Bayard published it in 1960.

We found a 1962 carbon of another letter to Calvin, saying it wasn’t surprising Bayard had sold only eight hundred copies of Bleak Land, since they’d refused to spend a nickel on promotion.

Eight hundred people must have been stumbling around in the dark inner recesses of their local bookstores, trying to avoid hangovers or tax collectors, when they fell down and found themselves clutching a copy of Bleak Land on the way up. What did Olin do to you in that hearing room? Tell you he’d lay off if you’d forever foreswear the friends of your youth?

I rubbed my eyes. “This is more than a day’s work. I almost wish Pelletier had ratted to Bushnell and Taverner-I’d love to know who his Communist cellmates were in the thirties.”

“Does that have anything to do with Marc’s murder?” Amy asked.

“I don’t know,” I said, petulant. “But scanning the reviews, I see Two Countries has an earnest young black photographer who’s a homosexual male-maybe that was meant to be Llewellyn. There’s a crowd of intellec

tuals, and worker wannabes from the university-kind of like the kids in SDS back in the sixties. It would be nice if he’d provided a key.”

Amy grinned. “That’s someone’s doctoral dissertation, not the job of the great writer himself. I read A Tale of Two Countries for a lit class. It’s beautifully written, and more substantial than For Whom the Bell Tolls, but Bleak Land, I think it didn’t sell because it wasn’t a good book. Maybe Pelletier was too angry when he wrote it, or maybe he was out of practice. Even before the blacklist, he’d stopped writing fiction and was doing a lot of work for Hollywood.”

“Did Bleak Land deal with things as autobiographically as Two Countries? I mean, would I learn anything about Calvin and that group from reading it? Because Pelletier only got to be friends with Calvin after Bayard Publishing brought out Two Countries in such a big way.”

“You mean was it another roman a clef? If Bleak Land is, I wouldn’t have known when I read it, because I didn’t know who any of the players were. I guess I could check it out of the library and try to see now if I recognize any of them.”

The librarian looked at us warningly: other people were trying to read in the reading room. We continued in silence for a time, only stopping briefly to eat some odd-looking sandwiches out of a vending machine. While we ate, I told Amy that the police were starting their own investigation into Marc’s death.