The Case of Walker Percy's "A Detective Story"

Several months before the first issue of The Hopkins Review (New Series) appeared, I learned that, thanks to the efforts of the Review's managing editor, Glenn Blake, it would include some unpublished posthumous pieces by Blake's mentor Donald Barthelme, a good friend of Walker Percy's. Knowing this, I wondered aloud one night over bourbon to an old college friend who happens to be Percy's nephew whether his late uncle might have left any unpublished material, an essay or story, that his aunt Mary Bernice (Bunt) Percy might agree to have published in the second volume of the Review as a sort of companion to the Barthelme pieces. Tom Cowan, the nephew, said that he couldn't be sure but that he would make some enquiries. He did, and I was eventually set loose with Mrs. Percy's permission in the Percy papers housed in the Southern Historical Collection at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill. Walter C. (Tim) West and his associate Biff Hollingsworth along with several other staff members there made many helpful suggestions about which parts of the archives might produce what I was in search of. At the start I thought it much more likely that a nonfiction prose essay (possibly a lecture originally) had remained unpublished over the years. But several likely candidates had been lately collected, and several other possibilities turned out to have been published in small-circulation newsletters or journals. The one substantial piece of Percy's fiction suggested by the UNC staff as a good candidate for the Review turned out to be the story published posthumously by the Oxford American with great fanfare in 1999, "Young Nuclear Physicist."

I then considered whether the Review might publish a portion of one of two unpublished novels by Percy. The earlier of the two (The Charterhouse) seems to have been destroyed completely, and so I read over the surviving typescript of the second (The Gramercy Winner), but failed to see anything that seemed appropriate for excerpting.

The big break came when I turned to a folder in the archives labeled D:55 that had the too-good-to-be-true tab inscription in Percy's hand: "MISC—Save for book." That's where the twenty-seven-page onionskin typescript of "A Detective Story" nestled behind pages of handwritten reading notes about Dostoevsky texts such as The Possessed and Notes from the Underground.

Since discovering the typescript of "A Detective Story," I have attempted to pin down the time and circumstances of its writing, but without any clear success. Certainly it seems to have come from an early period in Percy's fiction writing. Significantly, Mrs. Percy believes that the story must have been an early effort by Percy at short fiction. She recalls that once when Percy had finished a novel and felt reluctant to start another, she suggested that he try some short stories. But she also recalls his response: "Bunt, short stories are just too hard." Her other suggestion about the time of the story's composition is certainly tantalizing: she recalls the sudden appearance at the Percy home of an old fraternity brother who had left his family in North Carolina after telling his wife, just as William Pinckney does in "Detective Story," that he was going out for some cigarettes. He had then taken a bus to New Orleans, remembered that he was not far from Percy's home, and headed there. According to the man, Ansley Cope, Percy made him call his wife, talked to him for several hours, and then put him on a plane back home. But according to Cope and Percy, this encounter took place in 1972, which seems a late date for the inspiration of a story that seems to have come from an earlier time.

As there is no suggestion in the story that it is a recollection of a long-past incident, the facts that the Hotel Chisca in Memphis was no longer open after the late 1960s and that the last passenger train went through Jacksonville Terminal in...