The Truth About the Harry Quebert Affair: A Novel Read online

  Worldwide Acclaim for The Truth About the Harry Quebert Affair

  France

  “If you dip your toes into this major novel, you’re finished: you won’t be able to keep from sprinting through to the last page. You will be manipulated, thrown off course, flabbergasted and amazed by the many twists and turns, red herrings and sudden changes of direction in this exuberant story.”

  —Le Journal du Dimanche

  “A funny, intelligent, breathtaking book within a book . . . There is a real joy in discovering this extraordinary novel.”

  —Lire

  “A master stroke . . . A crime novel with not one plot line but many, full of shifting rhythms, changes of course and multiple layers that, like a Russian doll, slot together beautifully . . . In maestro form, Dicker alternates periods and genres (police reports, interviews, excerpts from novels) and explores America in all its excesses—media, literary, religious—all the while questioning the role of the literary writer.”

  —L’Express

  “The success story of the literary season . . . An American thriller reminiscent of the best work of Truman Capote.”

  —Paris-Match

  “Dizzying, like the best American thrillers . . . Rich in subplots and twists, moving backwards and forwards in time, containing books within books.”

  —Le Figaro

  Italy

  “After The Truth About the Harry Quebert Affair, the contemporary novel will no longer be the same. Verdict: summa cum laude. . . . A beautiful novel.”

  —Corriere della Sera

  “Narrative talent is about making a work of art out of life. Dicker has got it.”

  —Vanity Fair

  Germany

  “A book within a book, a crime novel, a love story. Extraordinary.”

  —Cosmopolitan

  “Brilliantly narrated.”

  —Stern

  Switzerland

  “A novel with all the ingredients of a global bestseller.”

  —Die Zeit

  The Netherlands

  “A story brimming with such intelligence and subtlety that you can only regret that it has to end. A novel that works on so many levels: a crime story, a love story, a comedy of manners, but equally an incisive critique of the art of the modern author.”

  —Elsevier

  “A novel that calls to mind the journalistic investigations of Truman Capote, the murder plots of Donna Tartt and the romantic scandal of Nabakov’s Lolita.”

  —NRC NEXT

  “Packed with action, psychological drama and . . . extraordinary suspense.”

  —NRC Handelsblad

  “Captivating and enchanting . . . a true literary adventure.”

  —Algemeen Dagblad

  “Wonderful dialogue, colorful characters, breathtaking twists and a plot that allows no pause for breath . . . Everything is perfectly woven together to create an irresistible story in which absolutely nothing is as it seems.”

  —Trouw

  Spain

  “Never have I felt so compelled to recommend a book this highly. . . . I was mesmerized and fascinated long after I had finished reading. . . . It has echoes of Twin Peaks and Death on the Staircase, John Grisham, Psycho, The Exorcist, and The Hotel New Hampshire by John Irving.”

  —La Vanguardia

  “This book will be celebrated and studied by future writers. It is a model thriller.”

  —El Periódico de Catalunya

  “Masterful . . . The great thriller that everyone has been waiting for since the Millennium Trilogy of Stieg Larsson.”

  —El Cultural de El Mundo

  England

  “The cleverest, creepiest book you’ll read this year . . . The most talked-about French novel of the decade . . . Breathtakingly plotted . . . Addictively fast . . . It’s like Twin Peaks meets Atonement meets In Cold Blood. . . . The New England setting [is] immersively convincing. . . . Very few foreign-language novels make big waves in Anglophone countries, but this one seems genuinely likely to buck the trend.”

  —The Telegraph

  PENGUIN BOOKS

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  A Penguin Random House Company

  First published in Great Britain by MacLehose Press, an imprint of Quercus Editions Ltd 2014

  First published in Penguin Books 2014

  Copyright © 2012 by Éditions de Fallois

  Translation copyright © 2014 by Sam Taylor. The translator asserts his moral right to be identified as the translator of this work.

  Penguin supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin to continue to publish books for every reader.

  Originally published in French as La verite sur l’affaire Harry Quebert by Les Editions de Fallois, Paris.

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  Dicker, Joël, 1985–

  [Verite sur l'affaire Harry Quebert. English]

  The truth about the Harry Quebert affair : a novel / Joel Dicker.

  pages cm

  ISBN 978-0-698-17112-1 (eBook)

  I. Title.

  PQ2704.I24V4713 2014

  843'.92—dc23

  2014008030

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Version_1

  CONTENTS

  Praise for The Truth About the Harry Quebert Afffair

  Title Page

  Copyright

  The Day of the Disappearance (Saturday, August 30, 1975)

  PROLOGUE

  October 2008 (Thirty-three Years After the Disappearance)

  PART ONE

  WRITER’S DISEASE

  (Eight Months Before the Book’s Publication)

  31.In the Caverns of Memory

  30.Marcus the Magnificent

  29.Is It Possible to Fall in Love with a Fifteen-Year-Old Girl?

  28.The Importance of Knowing How to Fall (Burrows College, Massachusetts, 1998–2002)

  27.Where the Hydrangeas Were Planted

  26.N-O-L-A (Somerset, New Hampshire, Saturday, June 14, 1975)

  25.About Nola

  24.Memories of Independence Day

  23.Those Who Knew Her Well

  22.Police Investigation

  21.On the Difficulties of Love

  20.The Day of the Garden Party

  19.The Harry Quebert Affair

  18.Martha’s Vineyard (Massachusetts, Late July, 1975)

  17.Escape Attempt

  16.The Origin of Evil (Somerset, New Hampshire, August 11–20, 1975)302

  15.Before the Storm

  PART TWO

  WRITER’S CURE

  (Writing the Book)

  14.August 30, 1975

  13.The Sto
rm

  12.The Man Who Painted Pictures

  11.Waiting for Nola

  10.In Search of a Fifteen-Year-Old Girl (Somerset, New Hampshire, September 1–18, 1975)

  9.A Black Monte Carlo

  8.The Identity of Anonymous

  7.After Nola

  6.The Barnaski Principle

  PART THREE

  WRITER’S HEAVEN

  (The Book’s Publication)

  5.The Girl Who Touched the Heart of America

  4.Sweet Home Alabama

  3.Election Day

  2.Endgame

  1.The Truth About the Harry Quebert Affair

  EPILOGUE

  October 2009 (One Year After the Book’s Publication)

  Acknowledgments

  THE DAY OF THE DISAPPEARANCE

  (Saturday, August 30, 1975)

  “SOMERSET POLICE. WHAT’S YOUR emergency?”

  “Hello? My name is Deborah Cooper. I live on Side Creek Lane. I think I’ve just seen a man running after a girl in the woods.”

  “Could you tell me exactly what happened, ma’am?”

  “I don’t know! I was standing by the window. I looked over toward the woods, and I saw this girl running through the trees. There was a man behind her. I think she was trying to get away from him.”

  “Where are they now?”

  “I can’t see them anymore. They’re in the forest.”

  “I’m sending a patrol over right now, ma’am.”

  The news story that would shock the town of Somerset, New Hampshire, began with this phone call. On that day Nola Kellergan, a fifteen-year-old local girl, disappeared. No trace of her could be found.

  PROLOGUE

  OCTOBER 2008

  (Thirty-three Years After the Disappearance)

  MY BOOK WAS THE talk of the town. I could no longer walk the streets of Manhattan in peace. I could no longer go jogging without passersby recognizing me and calling out, “Look, it’s Goldman! It’s that writer!” Some even started running after me so they could ask the questions that were gnawing at them: “Is it true what you say in your book? Did Harry Quebert really do that?” In the West Village café where I was a regular, certain customers felt free to sit at my table and talk to me. “I’m reading your book right now, Mr. Goldman. I can’t put it down! The first one was good, of course, but this one . . . Did they really pay you two million bucks to write it? How old are you? I bet you’re not even thirty. And already a multimillionaire!” Even the doorman at my building, whose progress through my book I was able to note each time I came or went, cornered me for a long talk by the elevator once he had got to the end. “So that’s what happened to Nola Kellergan? That poor girl! But how could it happen? How could such a thing be possible, Mr. Goldman?”

  All of New York—the entire country, in fact—was going crazy for my book. Only two weeks had passed since its publication, and it already promised to be the bestselling book of the year. Everyone wanted to know what had happened in Somerset in 1975. They were talking about it everywhere: on TV, on the radio, in every newspaper, all over the Internet. I was not even thirty years old, and I had, with this book—only the second of my career—become the most famous writer in the country.

  The case that had shocked the nation, and from which the core of my story was taken, had blown up several months earlier, at the beginning of summer, when the remains of a girl who had been missing for thirty-three years were discovered. So began the events described in this book, without which the rest of the country would never even have heard of the little town of Somerset, New Hampshire.

  PART ONE

  WRITER’S DISEASE

  (Eight Months Before the Book’s Publication)

  31

  IN THE CAVERNS OF MEMORY

  “THE FIRST CHAPTER, MARCUS, is essential. If the readers don’t like it, they won’t read the rest of your book. How do you plan to begin yours?”

  “I don’t know, Harry. Do you think I’ll ever be able to do it?”

  “Do what?”

  “Write a book.”

  “I’m certain you will.”

  IN EARLY 2008, ABOUT A year and a half after my first novel had made me the new darling of American letters, I was seized by a terrible case of writer’s block—a common affliction, I am told, for writers who have enjoyed sudden, meteoric success. My terror of the blank page did not hit me suddenly; it crept over me bit by bit, as if my brain were slowly freezing up. I had deliberately ignored the symptoms when they first appeared. I told myself that inspiration would return tomorrow, or the day after, or perhaps the day after that. But the days and weeks and months went by, and inspiration never returned.

  My descent into hell was divided into three stages. The first, necessary for all breakneck falls, was a blistering rise. My first novel sold one million copies, propelling me, at the age of twenty-eight, into the upper echelons of the literary world. It was the fall of 2006, and within a few weeks I was a celebrity. Even the harshest critics on the East Coast all agreed: young Marcus Goldman was destined to become one of our great writers.

  After only one book, the doors of a new life were opening to me: the life of a rich, young star. I left my parents’ place in New Jersey and moved into a plush apartment in the Village. I swapped my old Ford for a brand-new Range Rover with tinted windows. I started going out to expensive restaurants. I had taken on a literary agent who also managed my schedule and came to watch baseball with me on a giant screen in my new apartment. I rented an office close to Central Park, where a secretary named Denise, who was a little in love with me, opened my mail, made me coffee, and filed my important documents.

  For the first six months after the publication of the book, I contented myself with enjoying the sweetness of my new existence. In the mornings I went by the office to leaf through any new articles about me, to surf the Internet, and to read the dozens of fan letters I received every day. Then, feeling pleased with myself and satisfied that I’d done enough work for the day, I would wander the streets of Manhattan, causing a stir when I passed by. I spent the rest of my days enjoying the new rights I’d been granted by celebrity: the right to buy anything I liked; the right to a VIP box in Madison Square Garden to watch the Rangers; the right to share the red carpet with pop stars whose albums I had bought when I was younger; the right to make every man in New York jealous by dating Lydia Gloor, the star of the country’s top-rated TV show. Sure that my success would never end, I took no notice when my agent and my publisher fired off their first warnings about getting back to work and writing my second novel.

  It was during the next six months when I realized the tide was turning. The flood of fan mail slowed to a trickle, and fewer people stopped me on the street. Soon those who did recognize me started asking, “Mr. Goldman, what’s your next book about? And when’s it coming out?” I understood that it was time to get started, and I did. I wrote down ideas on loose sheets of paper and made outlines on my laptop. But it was no good. So I thought of other ideas and made other outlines. Again without success. Finally I bought a new laptop, in the hope that it would come pre-loaded with good ideas. All in vain. Next I tried changing my work habits: I made Denise stay in my office until late at night so she could take dictation of what I imagined were great sentences, wonderful one-liners, and the beginnings of remarkable novels. But when I looked at them the next day, the one-liners seemed dull, the sentences badly constructed, and the beginnings all dead ends. I was entering the second stage of my disease.

  By the fall of 2007, a year after the publication of my first book, I had still not set down a single word of the next one. I began to understand that glory was a Gorgon whose visage could turn you to stone if you failed to continue performing. My share of the public’s attention had been taken over by the latest rising politicians, the stars of the hottest new reality TV show, and a rock band that had
just broken through. Only twelve short months had elapsed since my book had appeared, a ludicrously short time frame as far as I was concerned, but on a global scale an eternity. During that same year, in the United States, more than four million babies had been born; almost two and a half million people had died; more than thirty thousand had been shot to death; half a million had started taking drugs; nearly four hundred thousand reported adjusted gross income of more than a million dollars on their tax returns; and some forty thousand had died in automobile accidents. And I had written just one book.

  Schmid and Hanson, the powerful New York publishers who had paid me a tidy sum to publish my first novel and who had great hopes for my future work, were pestering my agent, Douglas Claren—and he, in turn, was hounding me. He told me that time was running out, that it was imperative I produce a new manuscript. I tried to reassure him in order to reassure myself, telling him that my second novel was progressing well and that there was nothing to be worried about. But despite all the hours I spent in my office, the pages on my desk remained blank; inspiration had abandoned me without warning. At night, in bed, unable to sleep, I would torture myself by thinking that soon the great Marcus Goldman would no longer exist. That thought frightened me so much that I decided to go on vacation to clear my head. I treated myself to a month in a five-star hotel in Miami, supposedly to recharge my batteries, firmly convinced that relaxing beneath palm trees would enable me to rediscover my creative genius. But Florida was, of course, nothing but an attempt to escape. Two thousand years before me, the philosopher Seneca had experienced the same troublesome situation: No matter where you go, your problems go with you. It was as if, having just arrived in Miami, I had found myself chased down by a kind baggage handler, who said: