Plot It Yourself

“Jane Ogilvy is highly unlikely. The woman who wrote those three pseudo-poems and used the terms and locutions that appear in her testimony at the trial is almost certainly incapable of writing those three stories, including the one that she claimed she had written. Kenneth Rennert is of course a possibility, the only one left of the quartet. But his claim is based on a play outline, not a story, and we don’t have it. It might even be that his was an independent operation. Could we get copies of the television scripts he has written?”

“I don’t know. Shall I find out?”

“Yes, but there is no urgency. According to that report, they were dramatic in form and so contained nothing but dialogue, and would tell us next to nothing. I would like your opinion. Our job now is to find a person, man or woman: the person who in 1955 read The Colour of Passion

, by Ellen Sturdevant, wrote a story with the title ‘There Is Only Love,’ incorporating its characters and plot and action, persuaded Alice Porter to use it as the basis for a claim of plagiarism, putting her name on it, the bait being presumably a share of the proceeds, and at an opportune moment somehow entered the summer home of Ellen Sturdevant and concealed the manuscript in a bureau drawer; who repeated the performance a year later with Hold Fast to All I Give You

, by Richard Echols, using another accomplice, Simon Jacobs, changing only the method of establishing the existence and priority of the manuscript, suggested by the convenient circumstance that Jacobs had once sent a story to Echols’s agent and had it returned; who in 1957 again repeated the performance with Sacred or Profane

, by Mariorie Lippin, using still another accomplice, Jane Ogilvy, following the same pattern, with the advantage of another convenient circumstance, the death of Mariorie Lippin. I would like your opinion. Is Kenneth Rennert that person?”

I shook my head. “I don’t know him well enough.”

“You have read that report.”