This story — the TruTV, real-crime element of Lowell’s mission — is what had put Cedar Hills back on the best-seller lists.
But what had most firmly preserved the reputation of Edward Goodwin was something else altogether.
The answer to that was found in a later portion of the article, a throwaway line.
“And I’m sorry to report that my search for an extant copy of the sequel to Cedar Hills Road was unsuccessful,” Lowell added.
Malone swallowed a sizeable portion of bourbon. He looked out the window of the office at the astonishing flutter and sweep of lights from the buildings, the cars, the LED billboards, the sun too — low in the west. He shook his head and sighed. “I’m still surprised, to put it mildly.” This was a whisper.
“And I am too.”
They were referring to their independent and identical conclusions about Anderson’s Hope: That it was perhaps the worst novel of the twentieth century.
Unstructured, rambling, digressive, written in prose not worthy of a hormone-engorged high school student. Characters came and went without explanation. One chapter was practically cut and pasted from Cedar Hills verbatim. For page after page, nothing happened: The story didn’t move forward, characters were left undeveloped.
And worst of all, Jesse Anderson — who in the first book was the Augie March, the Holden Caulfield, the Frodo, the Katniss Everdeen, the adored centerpiece of the novel — turned into, as Malone said accurately, “a complete shit.”
Frederick Lowell had read the manuscript three times — over an agonizing several days — desperately searching to see if there was some way to salvage it.
But, no. It was garbage and nothing but.
Lowell and Malone agreed to take the line that the only copies had been destroyed by Samuel Coe. The movie producer, Ira Lepke, knew about it, of course, but Lowell was sure the manuscript was completely off the man’s radar. The lawyer had told Malone, “I know Hollywood. Once a studio decides there’s no movie potential in a book, it ceases to exist.”
“And what happened to the manuscript?” Malone now asked.
Lowell paused then said, “It’s where it ought to be.”
“Sad,” Malone said. “He was wrestling with the sequel, up until his last days, fighting writer’s block. Depressed. Drunk a lot of the time, I’d guess.”
Lowell said, “I’m not so sure. According to the date on the typescript and the letter from Connecticut he’d finished the sequel early in ‘67. I like to think that he’d shelved the sequel in February, kept working away on the Coe true-crime story, and spent his remaining months in Asheville. Maybe with a lover — could have been that Katrina Tomlison, the one who liked him to recite to her from the book.”
