Chandler never mentioned a second meeting, I told Carolyn, and neither did Hammett. But nine or ten months ago I’d been browsing through some books I’d bought for store stock, and I wound up getting caught up in one I’d never seen before, a memoir called A Penny a Word-and Worth It! by an old pulp writer called Lester Harding Ross.

Carolyn had never heard of him.

“Neither had I,” I told her. “Ross seems to have been a hack of all trades. He turned out thousands of words of fiction every day, none of it very good but all of it publishable. He wrote sports stories and western stories and detective stories and science fiction stories, and he did all of his work under pen names. He listed thirty pen names in his book, and admitted that there were others he’d forgotten. He really did spend his life writing for a cent a word, and never seems to have aspired to anything more. I hope he did a little better with his autobiography. It’s pretty interesting stuff, and I’d hate to think he only got six or seven hundred dollars for it.”

“He probably dashed it off in three days.”

“Well, that’s all the time Voltaire spent writing Candide. But all of that’s beside the point. The thing is, Ross really enjoyed being a writer, whether or not he took much pride in the stuff he was writing. And he enjoyed the company of other writers. He was acquainted with most of the pulp writers of his era, directly or by correspondence.”