by Helen McCloy
“No wonder there were no rough drafts or notebooks in Cottle’s house as there would have been in the house of a real writer. Just books and carbon scripts and clippings and contracts. No wonder the house was burned down before I had time to search it thoroughly and make sure that Cottle had left no notes at all, not even ideas scribbled on the backs of old envelopes. I would have known then that no writer had lived in that house.
“Which one of you three men wrote those books? The first book was about the Marines. Unlike Cottle-Sewell, Gus did serve in the Marines during the war. On the other hand Lepton quoted with approval the passage that referred to an arm bone as a leg bone in one of his reviews. Obviously his anatomy is weak enough for him to have been the author of the books. Was he praising his own work when he lauded Cottle so extravagantly? Lepton once told me that creative writing was a greater art than criticism which he compared psychologically, to vitriol throwing. Would a critic say a thing like that? It sounds more like a creative writer who has been subjected to criticism.
“Whoever wrote the books used certain Western turns of phrase like ‘tell him good-bye.’ Cottle, an Easterner from Vermont, would have written ‘give him good-bye.’ So would Gus, a product of New Orleans and New York. But either Tony or Lepton might have written ‘tell him good-bye.’ Tony hailed from the West Coast originally and Lepton from Chicago, the principal scene of Cottle’s last book. On the other hand, the apple woman story is a favorite of Tony’s. It also appears in one of the Cottle books and it was singled out for praise in one of Lepton’s reviews.
“Why did you need a physical stand-in for the Amos Cottle personality? Because of the TV program? Was it a modern version of Dr. Hale’s story, ‘My Double and How He Undid Me’? The story where an Irishman who substitutes for a literary clergyman on lecture programs gives the whole show away by getting drunk?
“There’s still another possibility. Can it be that all three of you were in this together? Tony and Gus and Lepton? That you were three-thirds of one ‘ghost,’ as a writer is called when he signs another, more famous name to his work?
“That would explain the peculiar financial arrangement. It was always so hard to believe that a decent agent like Gus Vesey would take Twenty-five percent commission instead of ten. But suppose Gus was writing one third of the Amos Cottle books and this was the only way he could get a quarter of the profits openly and legally without any bothersome questions from auditors or income tax people? A quarter because, of course, Cottle-Sewell had to have his quarter, even if he wasn’t doing any writing at all. That was paid to him openly and aboveboard as royalties. But Tony Kane got fifty percent of the subsidiary rights because Tony had to be rewarded for his share in writing as well as publishing the books, and Tony had to pay Lepton for his share in the writing. Lepton’s payment was the only sub rosa payment in cash, because you just couldn’t figure out a way to pay Lepton openly and legally for writing his share of the books he praised as a critic.
“Another odd detail: You were a triumvirate, and what is the most famous triumvirate in history? Octavius Caesar, later Augustus, Mark Antony, and a little man named Lepidus who might have been called Leppy if the Latins had gone in for that sort of diminutive. Gus, Tony and Leppy—three-thirds of a ghost. Like the name Amos Cottle, it was oddly suggestive of a poltergeist sense of humor, a spirit of malicious mischief pervading the whole situation.”
Lepton cocked his head to one side. His long, slender fingers played with his coffee spoon. “We’ll have to tell him, Tony.”
“Leppy’s right,” said Gus. “We’ll have to tell him. Maybe he won’t make it public.”
“All right,” said Tony. “But I want to make one thing clear first. It isn’t fraud. Not legally. Even this ten thousand award is being paid to the men who actually wrote the Cottle books. Pen names aren’t fraud. You can even sign a contract with a pen name and it’s still legal.”
“Then you were all three in it?”
“I’ll have to go back to 1951,” said Tony. “It seems a long time ago. We three were old friends, our parents, friends before us, all brought up in the book trade. I was a salaried editor at a small struggling publishing house run by a nitwit old dreamer, Dan Sutton. Leppy was even worse off—a free-lance critic trying to live on casual book reviews in magazines and newspapers. He’d spilled his guts writing one book he hoped would make his fortune. It didn’t. High praise from the critics and a sale in the trade edition of about six thousand copies. Leppy was broke and discouraged. Gus was just out of the Marines with a wife and two small children. He was having trouble getting back into radio. TV was going to kill radio anyway and he didn’t think he could adapt his writing to the TV technique. He’d started a literary agency on a shoestring and he was trying to support himself and his family with radio writing, hoping the agency would catch on before radio pegged out altogether. Unfortunately most of the scripts he was getting as an agent were duds.
“We three all met one night in a Third Avenue bar. We didn’t see any future we liked. We felt thwarted and bitter. It was Gus who said, ‘The hell of it is, each one of the three of us has a pretty good brain and knows everything there is to know about the writing and selling of books. But none of us can find an outlet—a way to use our brains profitably. If only there were some way we three could pool our wits and our knowledge…’”
Lepton took up the tale. “It was then that Amos Cottle was born. I got the idea from our names—Gus, Tony and Leppy—the triumvirate. We’d all been trying to write fiction on the side—to pick up a little extra money, even Tony. Now and then one of us would get an acceptance. Just often enough to keep hope alive. The torture of hope. More often we got rejections, and we all three knew that free-lance writing is the most heartbreaking trade in the world.
“So, that night I said, ‘Volume of production is damned important in writing. If you produce enough stuff regularly you’re going to wear down opposition sooner or later. That’s where most writers fail. They don’t produce enough, often enough for their names to be remembered first by editors and later by critics and public. But there’s one way we could get around that. We could pool everything that we three write and sign it all with one fictitious name. Then that name would be producing just three times what an ordinary writer could produce in the same time, and the sheer massive weight of that volume of production would force recognition sooner or later.’
“We were just tight enough and desperate enough to think that such a cockeyed scheme would work. And it did.
“We planned every detail as carefully as if we were plotting the grand strategy of a major war. Tony was in a position where he could, with any luck at all, induce Dan Sutton to publish the first book. I had enough prestige as a critic to launch it with a really enthusiastic review. In order to cover our tracks, in case anyone for any reason ever investigated the history and origin of Amos Cottle, Gus should act as his agent. If Cottle ever became really famous, we’d better have a complete record of how he first came to our attention as a writer. The sort of thing you could show to some nosey scholar like Hermione Featherstone or some naive student who wanted to write a Ph.D. thesis on the Oeuvre of Amos Cottle. Hell, someone might even want to write his biography if he really clicked.
“So we decided that Gus should slip the script into the pile of junk Meg was reading for the agency and let her discover Cottle. We’d decided from the beginning that no woman was to be in on the secret. A secret shared with a woman is no longer a secret. Besides, Meg would make such an honest witness about the way Cottle was discovered, if ever the thing were questioned. The other scripts Meg was reading that night were so bad she was bound to think Cottle pretty good. She just couldn’t help discovering him. After all, we are three pretty good writers.
“Of course Tony picked the girl he was training as a first reader to give Amos’s script a preliminary reading before he tackled it himself. Her detailed report would be helpful. If ever Cottle’s relation to Tony was questioned, that girl�
�s written comments were documentary evidence that Tony didn’t know or care anything about the script until he read it himself, that it was just another unsolicited typescript of a first novel by an unknown writer.”
Philippa looked at Tony, furiously angry. Meg looked at Gus, hurt and reproachful. Each woman was thinking of the thousands of little daily lies that had kept the myth of Amos Cottle afloat for the last four years.
“I’m sorry.” Gus laid a hand on Meg’s hand. “We were so damned broke, I had to do something.”
“You might have told me,” said Meg. “You should have known you could trust me. How can I trust you now, after all the lies you have told me?”
“Not lies. Stories,” said Basil. “You must make allowances for the literary mind.”
Tony met Philippa’s anger with a rancor that equaled hers. “I’ve always suspected that you rather admired the man you thought of as Amos Cottle, didn’t you, Phil? You were so careful to pretend to me that you didn’t like him or his books. That amused me. For I’m sure the only reason you admired him was that you thought you’d found a great mind at last and—the poor devil had only half a mind, if that.”
“How did you manage the collaboration?” asked Basil.
“Gus wrote a rough draft of one book each year and Tony revised it,” explained Lepton. “That’s how we got our four books in four years. Both drafts were pretty rough—hardly more than extended plot outlines, but both Gus and Tony are quite fertile in inventing incidents that follow a story line. I’m not. I’m not really a fiction writer. I’m a critic. And—excuse me, Gus and Tony—but any fool can plot. The plots of Anna Karenina and Vanity Fair are just nothing when summarized in one paragraph. They might both be stories from pulp magazines. It’s all in the writing whether or not a thing becomes literature. That’s where I came in.
“Tony dictated his stuff to a tape recorder when he was alone in his office. Gus banged his out on an old typewriter in his office. I took these pulpy melodramas and rewrote them in the fashionable style of the moment, with all the tricks of the trade I had learned as a critic. I made them literary. You see, I was saved the effort of inventing incidents, just as Shakespeare was when he rewrote the Ur-Hamlet and bits from Plutarch’s Lives and the Holinshed Chronicles for the stage. Like Shakespeare, I could concentrate all my attention and effort on the manner of the writing.”
“Modest fellow, aren’t you?” muttered Tony. “I thought the stuff was dreadful. Never could understand why it sold.”
Leppy ignored this.
“And where did you ever get Sewell to play the role of Cottle?” interposed Meg.
“I’m coming to that,” said Leppy. He continued. “As Cottle’s agent and publisher, Gus and Tony could associate freely with Sewell-Cottle and with each other. But as the critic who praised Cottle, I had to keep away from all of them in public, even though we were old friends. I met Gus and Tony secretly, when there was anything to discuss, and I never did meet Sewell-Cottle in person until the evening of the party at Tony’s house. It was an especially effective piece of misdirection to be able to say truthfully that Maurice Lepton had never met Amos Cottle. Made me sound unbiased as hell.
“Sewell-Cottle knew all about what we were doing. Gus and Tony had explained everything to him. He seemed perfectly happy about the arrangement. He was getting a far better income than a man without a past could hope to earn on his own and he didn’t have to work. Of course he knew less than nothing about writing and the book trade. That’s why it never occurred to him that he was in a position to blackmail Gus and Tony by threatening to expose the whole thing unless he got a larger share of the profits.”
“I don’t see how he could have done that without ruining himself,” said Tony. “Amos Cottle, the celebrated novelist, announces that he never wrote a line, that all his books have been written by his agent, his publisher and his most laudatory critic? He would have been exposing himself as a fraud and his income would have stopped right then and there. He couldn’t have bluffed us into believing he’d do that—not Amos!”
“One thing I don’t understand,” said Alec McLean to Lepton. “If your style made these books successful, why didn’t you use the same time and energy to write novels under your own name? You wouldn’t have had the volume of production and made so much money, but you would have had recognition as a novelist. That means a lot to most writers.”
“Dear Alec!” Lepton laughed. “You sound just like a publisher. If you were a writer you would understand. I am one of those unfortunates born at the wrong time and place. I’ve written novels by myself. They’ve all been rejected, because with stories of my own invention I cannot enter into the spirit of the twentieth century enough to please its reading public. With the plots and incidents of Tony and Gus it was different I despise the folk myths of our era and I can’t fake faith in them. That sort of faking is almost impossible. Any reader can detect real insincerity, and real sincerity will make even bad writing acceptable. But the Cottle books were perfectly sincere. You know why?
“My very hostility to the literary stereotypes of this age stimulates my critical sense, and therefore I can write parodies of contemporary novels with real relish and sincerity. That’s what the Amos Cottle novels were—parodies so subtly wrought that a bonehead like Emmett Avery missed the cryptic humor and took them for honest pastiches while the asinine public thought they were great novels.’
Lepton sighed. “Of course the whole thing succeeded far beyond our wildest dreams. We never expected anything like, this Bookbinders Award tonight. We ran into our first snag three months before publication. Someone in TV had heard a rumor there was a pretty hot advertising campaign being planned for a book at Sutton, Kane. He came to Tony and offered five hundred bucks for the author to be interviewed on TV on publication day. Tony stalled him and called a conference.
“The five hundred didn’t matter much, but there might be other occasions when Amos Cottle would be asked to appear on TV. There’s a lot of money in lecturing and of course a regular weekly TV program is a gold mine. It seemed a pity to miss all that, especially as the TV man said he was interested in a regular weekly program run by a popular author. It couldn’t be one of us who would appear as Amos Cottle. We were too well known in the trade. Leppy couldn’t admit he was Amos Cottle if he was going to praise the Cottle books in print. Dan Sutton would have got stuffy if he’d found out Tony was writing a book they were publishing under another name. Dan wouldn’t have let Tony have terms as good as those Gus was going to demand for Amos through Tony. Dan was a dreamer but he was also a publisher and he didn’t get dreamy about contracts.
“Gus didn’t want to combine the roles of agent and author. As Amos’s agent he could demand better terms for Amos in TV than he could possibly hope to get for himself when everyone in TV knew how broke he was. But if he was acting for Amos, he could easily hold out for good terms, saying that Amos didn’t need money and wouldn’t settle for less. Besides we all thought our triumvirate should be based on equality among the three of us. If any one personality became the TV Amos Cottle that the public knew, he’d have the whiphand over the other two. He could demand more than a third of the profits and get it. The other two couldn’t get rid of the man who was known to the public as Amos Cottle just as networks can’t get rid of an actor who has played one character in a series of programs so long he’s become that character in the public mind.
“Obviously it would be better if we could get a fourth man who for a fourth share of profits would play the role of Amos Cottle on TV. If he was someone who couldn’t write a line himself, he’d never be in a position to take over the property and put the other three out. After all, the writing was just as necessary as the Cottle personality to keep the thing going. The question was how could we find a man without a past who could step into the role of Amos Cottle publicly without dragging any of his own personality behind him?”
“That’s where I came in,” said Tony. “Mrs. Pusey’s husband wa
s a patient in that alcoholic clinic before he died and through the Puseys I got to know Dr. Clinton and heard the weird Caspar Hauser story of the sudden appearance of a man without a memory who had been found on the road and never identified. I asked Clinton to let me see him. The moment I did I thought he was made for the job. He was small and quiet and meek and utterly passive. As long as he never recovered his memory he was perfect for it, and Clinton didn’t think there was much chance of his relapsing into alcoholism as long as he was watched carefully.
“He was beaten, resigned, half a man—just what we needed for the robot Amos Cottle.
“I didn’t want Clinton to know the truth. So I fixed the deal with Alan Sewell himself. When he was offered a choice of writing or painting as occupational therapy, he was to choose writing. He was to make a certain amount of noise with a typewriter every day in his room copying out the telephone book or anything he liked. Of course he must refuse to show Clinton his work. If after a while Clinton got insistent, Sewell was to tell Clinton that he had bribed an attendant to mail the script to the Vesey literary agency in New York. Even if Clinton didn’t get insistent he was to tell him that after about thirty days. He didn’t really have to mail anything, of course. We took care of that.”
“I did,” said Gus. “I went all the way out to Stratfield Post Office and mailed the script to my own office in New York and then planted it in the slush pile for Meg to find and read. Tony insisted on writing letters to Cottle-Sewell about the revisions and contracts just as he would if he were a real author. The carbons he kept in his office and the letters w’ere kept by Cottle-Sewell in a file so there would be a complete record that looked open and aboveboard.”
“It was fun writing those letters,” put in Leppy. “I could indulge my taste for parody again as I did when I wrote the biographical note for the jacket of Amos’s first book.