Roderick Wraxall

Roderick Wraxall is 51 and has spent seven of those years as Leonora Vesey's literary agent. Born in Cheltenham, the son of an Anglican vicar, he studied at Oxford without finishing and entered publishing as a manuscript reader at a Bloomsbury house. At 44 he opened his own agency, with a desk, a secretary and a passion that acquaintances describe as obsessive. He speaks of books the way others speak of racehorses, and bets on both.

He works in a high-ceilinged room on the first floor of a brick building in Bloomsbury, with windows over a square of plane trees, shelves to the ceiling full of manuscripts tied with string, an oak desk and a worn Persian rug, where he paces back and forth when negotiating by phone. A brass samovar boils in a corner, and the secretary brings tea at any hour. In London, he lives in a flat on the same square.

He is very tall, almost two meters, thin and a little stooped from passing through low doors. He has a long face, a thin gray mustache and gray hair combed back with brilliantine. He wears a dark gray pinstripe suit, a black wool overcoat, spats, and carries a silver cigarette case in his hand, which he opens and closes as he speaks. Charming, talkative, he has the habit of bending to listen, and of laughing at the right moment.

He has represented Leonora since 1919, when six publishers had turned down her first novel. He says he spent seven years taking manuscripts door to door and that no one in this world believes in her more than he does. About the new novel, he says it's the best she has written, and that the critics turned up their noses at the ending. A book that divides sells slowly, but the good ones always find their audience. When the detective demands that he say where she is hiding, he asks him to lower his voice and says that if he knew, he would be there now.

It could be the loyalty of a professional who risked his name for an author he always believed in. It could be the charm of someone who sells, and knows how to sell, even his own worry. The detective will have to decide which.