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. Ultimately I think the most likely composition date is in the late 1950s, but I would not be surprised to learn from the discovery of additional evidence that the story had been composed at any time between 1946 and 1972. Certainly the story is quintessential Percy in many ways. The style seems very very early to me, from a younger, less experienced Percy.

Questions of course arise about the decision to publish something that an author never chose to release in his own lifetime. But ultimately his widow Mary Bernice (Bunt) Percy decided that, regardless of Walker Percy's insistence that the quality of a book, much less a story, could be determined by reading the first few paragraphs, the overall quality and especially the ending made the piece worth publishing, early effort though it might be. I would add that the work of a writer whose reputation is as high as Percy's should be made available to those interested in tracking his development and his forays into unusual and unfamiliar genres.

The most wonderful thing for me personally about the discovery of this little gem is the way that so many parts of my life came together to make it possible. Conversations with good friends from Rice and from old college days at Sewanee, where the Percys have been a pervasive presence for so long, my own literary education there that first introduced me to extraordinary writers of fiction of Percy’s ilk, and archival experience working in Victorian documents and manuscripts for myself and earlier, for Dickens expert Robert Patten all ended up contributing to the discovery being made. If one of those components had been missing, “A Detective Story” wouldn’t have seen the light of day, at least not at this moment. The usual dry-as-dust scholarly grind included a whole lot of fun in this case.