Letter, J. Mercer to a colleague

Dear Ruth —

You asked, kindly, whether I was ever going to publish the second season, and I owe you a straight answer instead of the one I give at conferences.

No. Not because of the missing photographs, though ninety-one exposures I have never seen is a poor foundation for anything. Because of one line on one plan.

You know the trouble. Plan says twelve, log says eleven, and both are in my hand, made a fortnight apart, on ground that no longer exists. The honest report says: three hundred and forty interments recorded, one position unresolved. That's the report I'd write. And every reader would skip the three hundred and forty and stop at the one, and the site would become a curiosity instead of a cemetery, and Mrs. Bardsley — who is dead now, and who mowed it for forty-one years and asked me to say it was a quiet place — would get a footnote in somebody's argument.

So I'm going to do the dull thing. The papers go somewhere they'll be kept in order and read by people who wanted to read them, and if the position on Row 7 is ever explained it will be explained by someone with better documents than mine.

I'd rather be the man who didn't publish than the man who published a puzzle. There are enough puzzles. There are not enough cemeteries recorded properly, and I did record it properly, except for the once.

Come and see us in the spring. Bring the dog.

Yours,

— Julian