Dear Old Blood

Notes on a Wittgenstein Noir

A Critical Companion

with a Foreword and Critical Commentary

by

Horace Murgatroyd
 Foreword

This book represents the first critical companion to Dear Old Blood in its second revised and

edited incarnation. It includes the full original annotated text by Herbert Denk, the purported

Wittgenstein specialist and discoverer of the now infamous ‘Rosro haul’. In order for the

reader to experience the text as it was originally received by both scholars and the general

public alike, a critical commentary on the text appears only after the detective story and

Denk’s Afterword. The reader may wish to bear in mind the following Wittgenstein maxim as

they proceed: Nothing is so difficult as not deceiving oneself.

 Dear Old Blood
Notes on a Wittgenstein Noir

Ed. by Herbert Denk

Revised Second Edition

with a new Afterword by the editor

 A picture held us captive. And we could not get outside it, for it lay in our language
and language seemed to repeat it to us inexorably. – Ludwig Wittgenstein

Iustum et tenacem propositi virum

non civium ardor prava iubentium,
non vultus instantis tyranni
mente quatit solida.1

Horace, Book III, ode iii, line 1

1
The man who is tenacious of purpose in a rightful cause is not shaken from his firm resolve by the frenzy
of his fellow citizens clamouring for what is wrong, or by the tyrant's threatening countenance.
 Preface

These notes were recovered from a tea-chest in the attic of a cottage on the west coast of

Ireland. For reasons of privacy, the owner of the tea-chest does not wish to disclose their

name nor how it came into their possession. It was originally recovered from neighbouring

Rosro Cottage, which is situated on a quay in Killary Harbour in Connemara, County Galway.

The item is believed to have been the property of the Austrian philosopher, Ludwig

Wittgenstein, despite the contents being written in English rather than his native German.

Wittgenstein resided in this small fisherman’s cottage in the summer of 1948, when it was

owned by Maurice Drury. Drury was the brother of M O’Connor Drury, a former student of

Wittgenstein’s at Cambridge who later became a close friend. The philosopher relocated

here to work on his second book, the posthumously published Philosophical Investigations

(1953). During Wittgenstein’s stay, a local man called Tommy Mulkerrins assisted him by

bringing him milk, peat, tinned goods from Galway, any letters from the local Post Office, and

helping out with chores. Mulkerrins also helped him burn the large piles of notes rejected

from the manuscript that would eventually become Philosophical Investigations. The

discovery of the tea-chest, however, suggests that some of these jottings escaped the regular

conflagrations. These notes have now been gathered together for the first time in this

volume. Assembled into the most likely chronological order and annotated with supporting

notes and occasional commentaries on the extraordinary material, they cast a new light on

the philosopher’s life and thought.

 Dear Old Blood1

The phone clanged into life for the first time in months, rattling in its cradle and bawling for

papa. Well, I was all ears now.

‘Nix.’2

The voice on the other end kept it brief. ‘The world is everything – that is the case.’3 That

word case hung in the air like a flashbulb at a crime scene. The hairs on the back of my neck

did a Lazarus. I hadn’t touched a case in years. I was small fry now. I did roving husbands and

missing cats, not cases.

‘Case? What case? Who the hell is this?’

‘We are going to be in touch, Mr. Nix.’ It was a voice that sang with money: plums for vowels

and consonants so crisp they rang out like stilettos on Italian marble.

Then the phone went dead.

Great.

I mulled over what little I’d heard. All I came up with was a solecism. Going to be? Will be,

surely? The mistake of a non-native speaker.

They came back. They always do. Two days later. After I’d had time to wrap the taste of a new

job around my palate like Château Latour ‘29. These were canny folk. What the hell was I

getting myself into here?

This time it was a dame. She carried the same money in her mouth as the first fella. The

same imperfect English, too. There was an accent daggering through her words.

Mitteleuropa. I could place it pretty precisely: somewhere between Hamburg and Vienna.

‘We are wanting you to investigate someone for us. His past habits. His life activities. You

follow?’4

‘Who am I talking to?’

‘That is of no importance, Mr. Nix.’

‘Okay, who is it you want me to look into?’

‘A philosopher.’

‘A wise guy, eh?’

The joke fell on deaf ears. ‘A logician, actually.’

I was getting bored of bandying polysyllables around. ‘How about gettin’ down to brass tacks,

lady. What’s in it for me?’

‘Whatever your usual fee is, we double it and add a nought on the end.’

‘You sure you can afford that?’

‘Mr. Nix, this endeavour is being underwritten by wealth you could not begin even to

imagine.’

‘Yes, but what price do you put on a man’s soul?’

‘Our man will be in touch.’

‘How w–’

The phone clicked off.

A month passed. Nothing. Then one morning an envelope arrived. It contained a one-way

ticket to England, details about a dead drop, and a photograph of the tail with a note

scribbled in pen on the back: ‘Trinity College, Cambridge’.

 II

I landed on a beautiful summer’s day in June. The rain was whipping the nation like a Jesuit

mortifying his flesh. Like I said, just beautiful. I took the train up from London. The placid air

of English civilization was suffocating. It was like being stuck inside a cucumber sandwich. I

kept getting asked if I wanted ‘a nice cup of tea’.

Cambridge was everything my guidebook said it would be: quaint. Trees, fields, a river, even

cattle all mingled with a polite English colloquialism that kept mistaking itself for urbanity

and calling itself a city. I kept tripping over bicycles and college buildings older than America.

Trinity College looked like a badly-mixed architecture cocktail: two parts castle, one part

church. But what did I know? What went on inside those ornate walls seemed to work. The

list of alumni read like the product line of a genius factory: Isaac Newton, Lord Byron, Alfred

Tennyson, and now this guy, Godwit. Over the massive gate stood a statue of that majestic

fat man, Henry VIII, brandishing a chair leg instead of a sceptre. It made me smile. Behind the

imposing gate was my tail. If I was gonna get past the porters, I’d have to pose as some kinda

egghead. I’d read plenty of stories, in the eyes of dead men, on the lips of dames, but that

kinda learnin’ was no use here. So I just hung about like a fly on a corpse, using the awning of

a nearby shop to fend off the rain, and keeping my peepers alert for the tail.

A local church bell was just ringing out my third damp hour when I spotted him. He was short

– 5’5, 5’6 – and dapper-lookin’. He wore a suit and tie and shoes so shiny you could shave in

them. He was the kinda rich that looks the part. His eyes shone with curiosity like a pair of

black marbles. There was no real warmth to them. Intellectual eyes, bent inwards. No

wonder he never spotted me as I followed him.

He ducked into a little Italian café called Sraffa’s. I followed him inside. He sat down at a table

in front of the window. I sat two tables back from him. He spent a lotta time staring into

space and a lotta time scribbling something on a paper napkin. A guy behind the counter

eyed him with suspicion as he did so. He was a tall thin man, swarthy-lookin’. He was

balancing a slug on his top lip and over his dark eyes hung a pair of beetling brows. Throw in

the waspish scowl and the guy was a regular entomologist. I took it this was the goombah

who owned the joint.

When the waitress came over, Godwit ordered espresso without looking up at her. He took

his coffee without sugar: the guy had that kinda class. When he was done drinkin’ and

scribblin’, he stood up and went over to the counter.

‘You again,’ said the goombah. ‘Whaddaya want now?’ He was a real charmer.

‘I need to talk to you about this.’ Godwit showed him whatever it was he’d scribbled on the

napkin.

Signor Beetle Brows was having none of it. A gesture followed – a flick of the fingertips

brushing the underside of his chin outwards, towards the philosopher-grammarian.

Whatever it meant, it seemed to ruffle Godwit. He tried another tack. ‘I’ll talk about

anything,’ he said. There was real desperation in his voice.5

‘Yes, but in your way,’ was all the goombah had to say before retreating behind the clatter of

porcelain.

Godwit seemed to feel it like a sock in the guts from a gorilla. He just stood there sorta

stunned a while. The sound of the door opening brought him back from his reverie. I

watched as he placed a bill down on the counter so crisp it looked as if it had been
steam-pressed. His face was not taut with rage but slack with disappointment. He scrunched

the napkin into a ball and dropped it absent-mindedly on the table he’d been sat at on his

way out.

I got up and left the king’s head smiling up at the ceiling. As I passed the table where my tail

had been sitting, I swiped the crushed napkin, concealing it up my sleeve, and made for the

door.

Godwit hadn’t gone far. He was outside on the cobblestones making the tailing awkward, so I

turned to look in a shop window: dame’s frillies. Typical. I did my best to look somehow

interested and indifferent towards the black lace D-cups and used the reflection in the glass

to keep an eye on Godwit.

A melody suddenly leapt off of his lips.

It had a yearning quality, like a question reaching out for an answer. Perhaps it was this very

gesture that made the man in the mustard suit and flat cap on the other side of the street

turn his way.

‘Excuse me, sir, could I trouble you for a moment?’

The guy looked like a cherub on stilts – rosy-cheeked, baby-faced, about 6 foot tall. The

mustard threads did him no favours but Godwit gave him the time of day anyway.6

‘Well?’

‘I’ve got this interview with a chap called The Tobacconist, see, and I’ll be hanged if I know

where to find him!’

‘His disciples are legion. Ask one of them.’ He turned to carry on his way.
‘Actually, I thought I was.’

He might as well have pulled a gun on him for how it stopped him in his tracks. He turned

back round.

‘So, you know how to crack wise, kid. And there I was thinking you was just outta shorts.’

‘Crack wise? I’m sorry, I don’t quite get your meaning.’ Now he was giving it the Mr. Innocent

routine.

‘Bertie lookin’ for a new scribe, is he?’

‘A new accountant, actually.’

‘Ah, so you’re a numbers guy, eh?’ He didn’t trust numbers guys.

‘Something like that. You couldn’t tell me where to find it, could you?’

He eyed Mr. Mustard with suspicion.

‘Please?’ English Mustard was tripping over himself with politeness. A real Limey charmer.

‘Head back up Trinity Road. Duck under Henry’s fat keister, then left into Nevile’s Court. Then

follow the sound of braying donkeys.’

The kid just stood there lookin’ gangly and lost.

‘I’ll tell you what I’ll do, kiddo. I’ll walk you there myself, but it’ll cost you.’

‘How much?’

‘More than you know,’ he said, a curious smile dancing on his lips.

The kid’s cheeks went pinker than the frillies I was gawking at.
‘Spiffing,’ he sputtered out.

‘After you.’

Off they went with me trailing unnoticed in their wake.7

 III

The place was swarming with young punks. I caught up with Godwit just as he entered the

crush. He was muttering to himself: ‘Bloody embryos! All desperate to be anointed Apostles.

If only they knew.’8

Above the din of drink-smeared voices, I saw him make out the sound of a jazz piano and
wince. That would have to stop. He sharp-elbowed his way through the crowd to the source
of the atrocity: a cheap upright being crucified under the unkempt digits of a drunk student.

‘Unless you want a little lead mixed in your martini, son, you best skedaddle.’

The pianist turned round. It was the same fella he’d helped in the street.

‘You again?! So you tinkle the ivories, eh? What time’s your interview, kiddo?’

’12.’

‘I make it ten to. Time for one or two Lieder. You must know some Schubert.’

‘Um,’ He was buying himself time. ‘A lied. No, I mean, a lieder, don’t I?’ he stammered. ‘Yes,

one song. I know one song.’

‘Which one?’

‘Wanderer’s Night-Song, I think it’s called.’

‘The question is still which one? Deutsche number 224 or 768?’ Wild, ferocious, impatient.

‘Um.’

‘I thought you said you were a numbers guy!’ He was getting riled.

English Mustard looked blankly back at him.

‘This is the more famous of the two.’ He whistled the introduction to both. A piercing
brilliance of sound that shocked the crowded bar into silence.
Unperturbed by the dropped jaws and glassy gazes turned his way, he was still trying to root
out the answer. ‘Well?’

English Mustard was as dumbstruck by this display as everyone else in the room. He nodded
meekly.

‘Off you go.’

English Mustard sat down before the keyboard, tall and gawky. He flexed his hands and
mimed out the opening chords, turned to the Whistler and nodded.

The opening bars were a shambles, but he ignored this, and struck up the vocal line on cue,
not singing, whistling. It came out pure as birdsong, his eyes fixed on the pianist, the note
slightly tremulous at the words that musta been scrolling through his head. I later clocked a
translation. Nothing too fishy. Kinda pretty, even.

You who are from heaven,

who assuage all grief and suffering,
and fill him who is doubly wretched
doubly with delight,
Ah! I am weary of striving!
To what end is all this pain and joy?
Sweet peace,
Enter my heart!9

By the end his eyes, which seemed to pin the young pianist to his stool, had softened, the
taut line of his mouth warped a little. He could almost be smiling.

‘Well, you mangled the ending but never mind.’

English Mustard was blushing. ‘I’m sorry.’

‘Forget it. Perhaps we can try the other Nachtslied sometime.’ He whistled the intro.

It was then that the dame walked in. Sequined up to the eyeballs in lapis lazuli, sashaying
through the crowd, bewitchment carved in ruby red all around her mouth.
‘Hot ziggety! It’s Lan!’

English Mustard looked up from his piano.

She was swathed in a white feather boa and matching elbow-length gloves. Her bobbed hair

looked like it had been carved out of black marble by Brâncuși.

‘Perfect timing, as always.’ Godwit said it under his breath but I still caught it. ‘And I see she’s
brought the big boys with her.’

She was flanked by a couple of hoods. One was a human pipe-cleaner with a halo of white
hair. This hood was cutting a graceful walk behind the dame. The second was shorter and a
little plumper with a neat side-parting. Both men were clean-shaven and doing their best to
look sharp in three-piece suits. It might work for the locals but it didn’t impress me. These
chumps had an idea of what a wise-guy was supposed to look like and had gone out and
bought the uniform. But something was missing. A certain colour.10

Still, genuine wise-guys or not, you could see they meant business, which meant trouble for
someone. The question was, who?

The three of them sat down at a table that had been kept for them by two other fellas, a
couple of straight-up queens. Gunsels, I reckoned. A Victorian beard with glasses and a
receding slick-back who’d lifted Elgar’s moustache. They were all over each other.

The sound of champagne corks popping had me reaching for my gat. Ain’t instinct a bitch.
White Halo beckoned the kid at the piano over with a single bony finger. Then his eye fell on
Godwit. A deranged smile did a little waltz across his lips. It was none too pretty. He elbowed
his friend in the ribs and pointed Godwit’s way. They looked at each other and spoke. Then
both men reached into their inside jacket pocket. I was sure they was packing heat and got
ready to hit the deck, but all they pulled out were briar pipes. They lit up and disappeared
behind a blue-grey fug.

‘You best get over there, kid,’ said Godwit.

English Mustard got up.

‘The Tobacconist’s the one who looks like a saint.’

English Mustard tried to thank him for his help but Godwit just batted the gratitude away like
a nuisance fly. As the gawky youth turned to leave, Godwit called after him: ‘You don’t play
too badly, kid. What’s your name?’

‘Tenpins.’

And he was gone.

The dame re-emerged on a small stage. The spotlight’s golden hue was turning her into a
Byzantine ikon, one that was irreverent as hell and didn’t give a damn. A new pianist had
appeared out of nowhere and struck up a tune. Then the dame let fly. Everyone’s eyes were
on her, even the queens. I had to admit, she had a lovely pair of pipes on her. Makin’
Whoopee. Why the hell not?

Godwit didn’t seem to like it. He stood there grimacing before spotting a vacant chair and
sitting down opposite me. I tensed up and tried not to show it.

I watched him gnawing his fingers and sliding round in his chair. A bad case of the fidgets. He
caught my eye.

‘How can anyone think listening to such caterwauling!’ he cried, his hands clasped to his
head. He was like a pit bull terrier. Incessant. Ferocious. ‘Who the bloody hell wants to listen
to that? But perhaps that’s the point. A paradox to join all the others that lot have found.’ He
gestured over to where the suits were sat with Tenpins wreathed in pipe smoke. ‘Russell’s
set.’

I felt like a dunce playing high stakes with philosopher kings. I wanted to keep him talking
without singing any flat notes, so I kept it brief: ‘Sounds logical.’

It received a dry sort of laugh.

‘Bertie’s the one with the self-satisfied halo. His meek friend is Mr Here Is One Hand.’ He
smiled grimly. ‘If you want an emetic, there it is: vanity of vanities, all is vanity.’

His eyes went all wistful for a moment until he shook himself out of it. ‘D’you know what that
ass with the beard calls me behind my back?’

I shook my head.
‘Herr Sinckel-Winckel. There’s English cosmopolitanism for you.’

‘Buncha Limeys,’ I sneered.

‘I knew you were American! Knew. Ha! That’s a laugh. What do I know? I don’t suppose you
read detective magazines, do you? Street & Smith?’11

Was this guy for real? Or was I being pumped? ‘Not my cup of tea, I’m afraid.’

‘Shame. You should try Norbert Davis. Rendezvous with Fear. It’s the good stuff.’

A flourish of scarlet sparkle sashayed into view.

‘Mind if I join ya, fellas?’

It was the dame from the stage. She was even prettier up close. Her mascara-thick lashes
fluttered like overweight moths towards the flame sat opposite them. Her eyes had been
pencilled black to point upwards at the sides, oriental-style. The bob was sheet-metal
straight and had the same blue-black sheen as oil.

‘Si’ down, Lan’, he said in a voice warm as Death.

The lashes made another dash for my heart. The victory was almost hers. I made my excuses
and headed for a vacant table nearby enough to earwig in on the conversation.

‘Don’t forget what I said about the detective mags!’ he called after me.

‘Who was that?’ asked the dame. Her smokey drawl sang of bourbon and cigarettes.

‘Drink?’

‘Bubbly. And noting cheap, neither. Roederer. I know you can afford it.’

He whistled over to the waiter.

‘Two glasses of Roederer. On second thoughts, better make it a bottle. We’ve got a lot to

discuss.’
He gave her the wild eye. ‘I thought we was through, lady.’

‘We ain’t never through.’ When she had gristle in her mouth, she didn’t mind spitting it out.

‘But I’ve got new problems now,’ he murmured. ‘Scheisse! I have not time for this!’

‘I don’t care Dixie ‘bout your problems, sweetheart. I got plenty of my own.’

It was a red rag to a bull. The eyes raged in their sockets. She just smiled and lit a cigarette,

blowing the glaucous plume of smoke his way. Not done goading him, she adjusted her dress

to show off even more of the delicate curve of her leg. If she’d’ve been a fella, it might even

have worked.

The waiter arrived and served the champagne. The dame picked up her coupe and took a sip.

‘Mmm-mmm! Drier than a duck pond in Death Valley.’

He winced at the choice of words. She hitched up an eyebrow and settled back into her chair.

She let another stream of smoke wend its way across the divide between them before

breaking the silence: ‘Okay, Mr. Philosopher. I’m a curious bird. I’ll indulge you. What’s this

problem of yours?’

‘A bloody curious bird is my problem: the duck-rabbit.’

‘Excuse me?’

‘The duck-rabbit.’

‘This isn’t like that rhinoceros of yours, is it, honey? Remember that time with Bertie when

you refused to admit that there wasn’t one in the room with you both?’

‘And I was right not to. Facts, not things. Nothing empirical is knowable.’
‘If you say so, sugar. It’s all grist to my mill. Now about this, um, what’d you say it was?’

‘Duck-rabbit.’ ..

‘Ye-es. Duck-rabbit. Stolen, was it?’

‘Yes. And no. When the duck’s there, the rabbit disappears. When the rabbit’s there, the

duck disappears. But there is never the duck and the rabbit together.’

‘Is this my fault as well?’

‘No, this is nothing to do with the bewitchment of language. This is to do with the

bewitchment of the mind. Aspect. Gestalt. Seeing-as.’

‘I see.’

‘Well I don’t!’ he boomed.

‘What’ll we toast to?’ she said, raising her glass.

‘Silence.’

‘Ha! Your sense of humour is definitely improving.’

They clinked and drank, one witheringly so.

She smiled. ‘How long’s it been since we first met, Luki?’

‘31 years ago. It was a cold night. I’d been on watch for hours. Only me and the moonlight.

The beasts of my troop slept like drunk dogs. I had nothing to do but think. And in these

thoughts I found myself tracking a mystery. I was trailing a bitch who’d been screwing

humanity like a cheap broad on the make not just for centuries but millennia. Yes, the Dame
In A Thousand Dollar Dress, all sequined sparkles. Name? Countless fools had tried to nail

her, ended up laying down with her. Oh, she wooed all the greats: Plato, Kant, Hegel,

Schlegel... Why not me? Trick was to leave these fallen comrades where they lay, unread on

the shelves, in their dust-bound leather carcasses. Without looking up their mistakes, I could

creep up on her unawares here – in death’s back garden, under the eclipsed light of Western

civilisation. I could show the world that there was no riddle, only the illusion of a riddle: the

bewitchment of language! That was you, Lan.’

‘I’m still a looker, ain’t I?’

‘Well, you are still leading philosophers astray, if that’s what you mean.’

She sighed and stubbed out her cigarette. ‘How many more years are we going to dance this

dance?’

‘Until one of us dies.’

‘We both know who that will be.’

‘Not without a fight, Lan.’

Someone whistled from the stage.

‘Well, sugar, looks like I’m still wanted somewhere. Be seein’ you around.’

‘If you must sing, could you at least sing something that doesn’t sound like machinery.’12

She smiled. ‘Just for that I’m gonna make the next one Schoenberg.’

Godwit’s eyes followed her as a flourish of scarlet sequins sank out of sight in the tenebrous

gloom of the club. When she reappeared on the stage and struck up an atonal cabaret song,
he let out a bitter laugh and tottered off to see what the philosopher kings had to say for

themselves.
I took the scrunched-up napkin from Sraffa’s out of my pocket and rolled it out flat. The pen

had bled into the paper but I could still make it out. A crude drawing of a duck, no, a rabbit,

no, a ... a duck-rabbit!13

It felt like I was finally getting somewhere with this case. I just didn’t know where. Was this

some sort of code? A valuable item, say a statue, that he owned and they wanted?

I glanced over to the bigwigs. Godwit was pacing up and down in front of their table. He

looked more like a madman than a philosopher. Thinking will do that to you. Rattlin’ around

inside your own head too long ain’t smart.14 I needed to get an ear on the conversation. I

figured the shroud o’ pipe-smoke billowin’ outta the dons would cover me, so I skulked over

and did the ol’ shoe-lace-tying routine.

‘Godwit, dear boy, are you thinking about logic or your sins?’ asked the Tobacconist.

‘Both.’

‘You still wish to be perfect.’

Another man had joined their table. This one looked like a heavy. A brawler.

‘We were discussing whether there are philosophical questions? Popper here has some
ideas.’

‘Bertie here says you think there aren’t any!’ said the bald man. ‘What rot!’

‘Easy, Popper. You’ll only get him riled.’

‘I’ll teach you differences!’15

Godwit had slipped a hand inside his jacket. When he pulled it back, it was clutching an iron

poker. It looked like it had beaten sense into no end of skulls. He dropped it on the table to

shake them up a bit. They all jumped – edgy as cats.16

‘You brainless, incompetent giraffes,’ he said with a mouthful of scorn.17

What did this lot know about the trenches of the mind?18

Then he stormed off.

I was in two minds. Should I follow Godwit or stick around and see what these eggheads had

to say? I followed my gut and went after Godwit. He was the tail, after all. I didn’t need any

help gettin’ distracted and I couldn’t see these sharpshooters sayin’ much I’d understand

anyways. I’d need to brace them sooner or later but I’d shake them down one at a time. So I

downed my giggle juice and got going.

I made for the sunlight at the end of a long, gloomy, smoke-filled tunnel. English pubs make

the bars in New Jersey look like hospitals. Once outside, my peepers couldn’t cope with the

brightness so I put my sunglasses to see where my tail was. I looked both ways but Godwit

was nowhere to be seen. Damn! I turned on my heels and headed back into the fug intent on

pumping wiseguys and eggheads for all the juice they had on Godwit.

Back inside and with three fingers of Glenfiery in my hand, I started making enquiries. I

wheedled my way into the Tobacconist’s gaggle. He had plenty to say and a very roundabout
way of sayin’ it. He kicked off with a story about Godwit and a rhinoceros, when he’d refused

to admit that there wasn’t one in the room. I couldn’t see his point. He told me that most

people thought Godwit was a lunatic because he’s very highly strung, like an artist – intuitive

and moody. He gets into rages when he can’t understand things. He was the most perfect

example of a genius he’d ever known. He listed more qualities: passionate, dominating,

acutely intellectual. ‘He is the young man one hopes for.’ Godwit had been his apprentice, a

sort of heir to his intellectual throne. But the Tobacconist soon tired of these reminiscences

and kept bringing the conversation back round to him. Turns out, he’d done time in the big

house for conscientious objection. Pacifists, I said, are the only people who can make

Commies look half-way decent. He wafted this away like so much pipe smoke. ‘Silly boy! You

Americans...’ drifting into incoherence as he sipped his champagne. The smog of pipe smoke

was unbearable. I coughed and started to make my excuses, thinking I’d milked the old man

dry, but he had one more nugget to give and it was a 24 carat gold. He gave me the name of

a book. ‘The gospel according to Godwit,’ he said. ‘Of course, he never thought I understood

it, even after I’d written a bally introduction!’ Finally I had what I’d come for. A way into the

man.

The title was catchy as hell: Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. I tracked down a copy in a

second-hand book shop called David’s. 1 and 6 pence. 5 bucks. I was robbed. Half of it was in

German. I skipped the introduction and went straight for the dope. It was written out like a

shopping list. What the hell was this? I read the first line.

1. The world is everything that is the case.

Well I’ll be damned. They’d been playing me like a violin the whole time. I read on.

1.1 The world is the totality of facts, not of things.

1.11 The world is determined by the fact, and by these being all the

facts.

1.12 For the totality of facts determines both what is the case, and

also all that is not the case.

1.13 The facts in logical space are the world.

1.2 The world divides into facts.19

It read like a manual for a shamus. Any private eye worth his retainer and expenses would

recognise the drill. I’d been lookin’ at the case all wrong. ‘Philosopher’. This guy was no

philosopher. He was me. A gumshoe. A key-hole peeper. A private investigator. But what was

the case he was workin’? It was time to start knockin’ heads and gettin’ answers.
 IV

The next day I woke up early. Maybe it was the time difference or the bed - I’d known

concrete floors that were cosier. One look at my face and the landlady at the flophouse knew

better than to make small talk. She busted my gut with bacon and eggs and coffee so weak I

felt like charging it with fraud. I headed to Sraffa’s for a proper wake-up call and then took up

my usual post outside the college, where the fried breakfast sat like a bowling ball in my

stomach. This country.

It was 10.30 and there’d been no sign of Godwit. And now I was all outta smokes. A couple of

fresh-faced eggheads came into earshot as they walked past.

‘Who have you got now?’

‘That Austrian fellow. Heard he’s a bit of a tyrant, what!’

‘Oh, he’ll tear a strip off you alright, if you’re late. Probably his army discipline. He was at the

front for the Austro-Hungarians during the Great War. Won a medal for valour, they say.

Anyway, he’s an odd fish alright but jolly smart!’

‘We’d better make a dash for it, if we don’t want to catch hell.’

I hotfooted it after them inside the college.

We passed through a couple of courtyards. They were like time capsules from the Middle

Ages. Perfect quadrants of grass manicured to perfection by an army of mowers. The boys I’d

been following were soon swamped by other eggheads piling into a corridor and then up a

stair well. The voices around me were plum with old money. I felt like a duck outta water,

about to get shot, plucked and served up à l’orange. They all seemed to know the drill. Pick
up a deckchair from outside, take it in and sit down. I didn’t bother with the chair but

squeezed into a corner and stood. I got some fishy looks but I was used to that by now. I just

glared right back and the looks disappeared. Godwit was stood at the front of the irregular

rows of deckchairs – his rooms, as it turned out – and the lecture, if that’s what the hell it

was supposed to be, was already underway. He was pacing up and down posing himself

questions.

‘Suppose I said I know that that’s a tree. What do I mean by know here? How do I know?’

It was like some kinda crazy vaudeville act. It reminded me of the whackos I’d seen at

Pennhurst.20 Real schizoid stuff. When he couldn’t answer these question, he’d go even more

nuts.

‘I’m so bloody stupid today! Think, damnit!’

Here was the wasp I used to trap inside a jam jar as a kid, ‘cept he was trapping himself

inside questions, buzzin’ uselessly against their walls. It was then that I saw her in the front

row, cigarette on the go, candy-red heels dangling off one foot. It was Lan! How had I missed

her? She smiled at the philosopher, occasionally blowing smoke his way. He pretended he

hadn’t seen her, just kept up with his schizophrenic routine. He should have brought the act

to Broadway; he would have made a killing.

Eventually the show was over. He slumped into a deckchair, finally defeated by the

self-interrogation. The eggheads saw this as their cue to leave; they all spilled out the room,
taking their deckchairs as they went. Lan wriggled out with them in the hubbub, her

entertainment over for the day. I stayed behind on a whim. Godwit didn’t notice me. He was

up out of the chair now and busy throwing damp tea leaves all over the wooden floor,

another vaudeville act even crazier than the first. He chuntered away to himself as he

scattered them. Like their minds, all clogged up with dirt. Mine is no better these days. I let

him rattle on hoping for something useful. When I didn’t get it, I stepped in.

‘Lotta folks round here seem to think you’re a genius, sir. Are you a genius, Mr. Godwit?’

He looked up briefly and carried on with the tea-leaves. ‘Oh, hello again. Had enough of Lan’s

bloody racket, eh? Genius you say? Me? What do you think?’

‘Well, I couldn’t understand the questions you asked.’

He smiled at that. ‘You could say: Genius is courage in one’s talent. Are you a visiting

scholar?’

‘Who me? No!’ I said laughing. ‘I ain’t got the brains for that. I’m just a tourist. I got family

from Cambridge, Massachusetts. Figured it was time to visit the motherland.’ I could play

dumb all day long if I needed to. As my ex-wife used to say, I didn’t even have to try that

hard.

‘What’s the American Cambridge like?’

Here was my opportunity to clock a reaction. ‘It’s pretty rural. Nothing but ducks and rabbits

round about.’

His eyebrows shot up. I’d hit a nerve. And then like every guilty man I ever saw, he looked

towards where his loot was stashed, in this case a desk in the corner. On it was a white

porcelain figurine with a beady black eye sat on a desk. It looked like a duck. No, a rabbit. No,

a... It was the duck-rabbit! It had to be. Finally, something solid to cling to in the case. The

duck-rabbit had been sat on his desk the whole time!19 The questions came thick and fast.

Where had he got it? Why was it so damn important? Was it valuable? Is this what the client

was really after? Should I add it to my report?

I was about to steer the conversation towards the duck-rabbit on the desk, but before I

could, there was a knock on the door.

‘Excuse me. Professor Godwit?’ It was English Mustard looking more cherubic than ever. ‘I

was wondering if you had another moment.’

From the smile dancing across Godwit’s lips, he seemed to have plenty. His eyes were lit up

like Times Square. He’d forgotten my presence in an instant. I felt like that damn rhinoceros.

‘Of course! Come in!’ He practically roared it out.

I said good-day to a pair of deaf ears and left, slow enough to catch any loose juice from the

pair of ‘em, but the door closed on my heels and I caught nothing.
Tenpins was a regular visitor over the coming days and the two became inseparable. Best

buddies. They went out a bought furniture together for Godwit’s rooms, on the rare times he

found something that satisfied him. Shopped for new threads, too. They would “do

philosophy” in his rooms. I guessed it wasn’t always the Platonic kind. Those kinda antics

were standard operatin’ procedure with the high-falutin’ crowd. Kinda reminded me of the

time I visited Frisco. I’d also hear ‘em performing songs in a local pub called The Man Loaded

With Mischief. Tenpins on the ivories, Godwit whistling lieder by Schubert. They were pretty

good. If the lecture racket ever dried up, the pair could take this show on the road. I got hold

of an LP of some of the songs. I figured it might help attune my mind to Godwit, to use the

lingo I was surrounded by here. The lieder were sung by an English lass called Kathleen

Ferrier. I sweet-talked my way into usin’ the landlady’s record player. Ferrier was as easy on

the ear as she was on the eye. Did it get me any closer to understanding Godwit or Tenpins?

Not an inch. Nor did it bring clarity to the duck-rabbit. By my reckoning, all it did was ensure

that the landlady would expect more than sweet words the next time I spun the disc.

A week had now passed and it was time for my first dead drop. Over a plate of dead pigs and

congealing eggs, I wondered what I had to say and who the hell I would be sayin’ it to.

Adding spice to the situation, I think the landlady was gettin’ sweet on me. Between

cigarettes and gruesome slurps of tea, she engaged in the kind of small talk that was

practically indecent. It was like an Italian suppository: full of innuendo. ‘I luvva birra sausage,

me!’ followed by histrionic winks. What was worse, I was bored enough to even think about

indulging her.
I spent the rest of the morning in my room turning the scribble in my notebook into

something more respectable on a portable Olivetti. It didn’t amount to much – times and

dates of his movements, who he’d met and where, snippets of conversations – but it had to

be better than nothing. My gut told me to keep schtum about the porcelain duck-rabbit. I

stuck it in an envelope and headed out to the dead letter box.

The dead drop instructions were about the only thing that was clear in this case: St Giles

Cemetery off Huntingdon Road every Monday by 3pm. I was to look for a tombstone that

was a simple slab of stone laid flat on the ground with six pennies stacked up on the top right

corner of it. The envelope with the report in it had be to tucked under some ivy and pine

needles and a penny removed from the pile. It was cloak and dagger stuff. Spy-craft. I didn’t

like it one bit.

I made the drop at 2.55. I knew better than to hang around and wait to see who showed up.

They probably had peepers on me the whole time. The cemetery had yew trees and

gravestones aplenty with hedges and railings all around it. I’d have been spotted if I’d tried. I

might be rusty but I was no rookie.

The next morning over breakfast, I heard the landlady sigh. I expected more lamentations on

the housewife cross, the usual litany of overworked and underloved, with a subtext in type

72 font tellin’ me to do something about one or the other. Another sigh and I had no choice

but to take the bait – I still needed that gramophone.

‘What gives?’ I asked, my teeth cracking through bacon that kept reminding me why Limeys

had such rotten teeth.

‘A story in the paper. It’s terribly sad. Local lad killed in a plane crash. He was only 26. He

looks like such a lovely handsome...’ Her voice trailed off. God only knows what kind of

terminally-scuppered fantasies were playing out in her mind.

My gut was less reliable than ever with all the grease it was processing, but it gave me a

twinge all the same. I asked to have a peep. The headline read: Bright mathematician killed

in aeroplane tragedy. There was a photo in black and white. I almost did a double-take. It

was Tenpins. Details were thin on the ground. The plane had come apart mid-air into five

sections. No body had been found. It sounded suspicious as hell. Could it have had

something to do with Godwit? Or my client? I was starting to think that damn duck-rabbit

was cursed. I jotted down the details in my notebook hoping for inspiration. None came.
 V

The trail went cold. Days slid into weeks. The air got even damper so that my bones started

to ache with it. I bought a new raincoat and an umbrella. I assumed Wittgenstein was laying

low inside the college, licking his wounds. I felt for the crazy punk. I was reduced to roping his

old pals for variations on the same old themes. I waded through his book I don’t know how

many times but the only bits that made sense to me were the start and the end, plus some

lines about mysticism that spoke to the agnostic in me. My reports were becoming thin gruel

for the client, thin enough that on my last drop, there was a message waiting for me, some

taxidermist’s horror show. The head of a rabbit with its ears removed and replaced with an

orange duck bill. These guys didn’t do subtle. So they knew about the duck-rabbit regardless

of my silence about it in the reports. It was clear what they wanted. I just had no idea how to

get it was all.

The landlady was now making regular knocks on my door in the afternoons and I had got into

the habit of answering them. Afterwards, we would lie on the bed and smoke her cigarettes.

Woodbines. ‘Gaspers’ she called them. It felt like each one took a year off my life. The room

was left wearing a blue veil of fumes revolving in the light when she eventually left.

It was getting so I had to make something happen. A midnight raid on the duck-rabbit

statuette in Godwit’s rooms, say. Anything to stop the case from stalling fatally. Then,

loitering by the Trinity gate as usual, Godwit was suddenly across the way and almost out of

sight. It was mid-autumn now. He showed he was ex-army by the way he walked: he didn’t,

he marched. I had my work cut out keepin’ up with him. His manic pace suggested he was
trying to shake something off. His past life, perhaps. Or maybe he’d gotten wise to me and

was trying to shake off his tail.

The town looked even more quaint in the Indian summer sun. It kept reminding me of a

jigsaw my grandmother liked to do on Sundays. I thought I could get used to it if I stayed long

enough. Say, 20 years.

We did a long convoluted tramp all over the town, taking in all the sights – a field full of

cows, college buildings, more college buildings, and the river which, by the way the eggheads

were pushing their boats down it, everyone kept confusing with the Grand Canal in Venice.

There were no blocks, no grid, no sense of organisation. You’d have a house next to a pub

and then a college next to a hospital. Everything was helter-skelter. The three blind mice

could have planned it better.

To pass the time, I made a note of all the pubs that we passed. It was like a crazy menagerie.

Spotted Cow. Spotted Leopard. Durham Ox. Various Swans, a Dolphin and a Unicorn. I

guessed if you was loaded enough you saw pretty much all of these creatures at one time or

another.

An hour passed. I felt like I was being taking for a long pedestrian ride. The only thing I saw

him do of interest was glance at his watch twice. We were heading back into the city centre.

He stopped outside a movie theatre on Mill Road called The Playhouse, checked his watch

again, shook his head, and went in. He was no longer in the foyer, so I had to think quick.

There were three films showing at 14:30. A weepie with Gene Tierney and Rex Harrison
called The Ghost and Mrs. Muir, Apache Rose starring Roy Rogers and Pirates of Monterey. I

didn’t have him pegged as the sentimental type, so the question was whether he was more

of a gunslinger or swashbuckler? He didn’t look like much of either. Then I remembered the

eggheads saying he’d been at the front in the First World War. Even if he wasn’t packin’ any

iron, he must still know his way round a gat. Maybe he still pined for it. I bought my ticket for

the western and went in.

The lights were already down in the movie theatre. It was pretty full but the usher showed

me to a seat nearer the front. Lady luck was obviously smilin’ on me for once, ‘cos I was only

two rows behind him. Godwit had picked the front row and was glued to the action on the

screen. I spent an hour and a half watching him watch a film I’d already seen twice. That’s

detective work for you. All glamour.

I must’ve fallen asleep. When I awoke, the film was still rolling but Godwit had company. A

bloke. They looked pretty cosy.

Afterwards, I sniffed around, spoke to a couple of friends off the record. A lad called

Hastings, a dame called Passacaglia.

‘He’s his amanuensis,’ said Haste.

‘Could I have that in plain English?’ I asked.

‘Scribe,’ said the dame.

I said, ‘You mean copyist, right?’

She said yes. I said, ‘Then why the hell didn’t you just say that?!’

She looked nonplussed. I dug for more diamonds.

Seems Godwit would dictate notes to this kid and he’d get it all down on paper.

‘Why him?’ I asked.

‘He’s smart but not a genius. He has this childlike quality. Naïve, I’d guess you’d call it.’

Finally, they were speaking plain English.

‘He looks like a kid,’ I said.

‘Almost half his age,’ said Hastings. ‘Nice boy, though, Frankie. Simple. That’s rare round

here.’

I decided there and then that I’d call him The Kid.

Just like with Tenpins, I followed the pair around, got to know their routine. With these two,

it was all about the movies. Westerns and musicals. I didn’t mind that. It gave me something

to pad my reports out with and it got me thinking: why the hell was this wise guy into what
the Marxists were calling industrialised culture and manufactured art? It was a cultural

cocktail of high and low.

The Scribe towered over Godwit. They looked happy. Why the hell shouldn’t they? I figure

everyone has the right to happiness, even gunsels. I heard myself thinkin’ this thought in a

pub drinking beer so warm it felt like a sample I once gave to a doctor. Was I gettin’ soppy?

Was the beer makin’ me sentimental? Or was it the Schubert? Maybe it was the landlady’s

coochy-cooing. Follow a fella too long and you start to lose your mind and adopt theirs. I’d

seen it happen before to others, but this was a first for me.

So it went for a few months. Then the trees started to rust. Fall was upon me. Everything

dew-drenched and misty and so damn depressing that I’d’ve called Melancholics Anonymous

if they existed. Life got longer as the days shortened. I spent more time in The Man Loaded

With Mischief, smoking and drinking and staring into the fire. Maybe it was the westerns

lulling me into this barfly sensibility. Maybe I just wanted out.

But then something happened. Something always does.

The Kid dropped out of view. Boy, did he take some findin’. I clocked him gardening not just

once but for a whole week. A week later and he was gone again. I found him in a factory on

the outskirts of town. Manual labour. The scribing was over. Godwit was nowhere to be seen.

It was fishy as hell. What did it mean?

Death, apparently. The landlady’s newspaper was again the source. History was repeating

itself in every way. Another of Godwit’s associates in the morgue. The paper said the Kid had

been lammed by TB. Godwit had been in the hospital with him. Maybe it just looked like TB.

Could Godwit really be to blame?

The way I saw it, I had two bodies and Godwit was the only clear link between them. But

perhaps I was looking at it all wrong. Perhaps it was a case of aspect, like the duck-rabbit.

Godwit clearly had a thing for innocents. Or maybe it was just innocence. As if these young

pups were a beautifying mirror to look in and see the person he wanted to be. Not corrupt

and sick on the inside. Perfect. Godwit had a guilt complex as high as the Empire State

Building. That Passacaglia had mentioned he’d already made a confession. My ears had

pricked up at this.

‘To who?’ I’d asked.

‘A whole bunch of us. At different times. One on one.’

I didn’t like it one bit. Guilty men never confess that easily, not to anything worth doing jail

time for.

I went to see the Kid’s family. They had no love for Godwit. Just plenty of blame for making

him give up math to work in a factory. Socialism-by-proxy, his sister called it. Sounded about

right to me. He’d talked about emigrating to the USSR with the Kid. Proof that Commie

colours don’t just run off in the wash.

As for Godwit, he looked like a broken man who was runnin’ out of friends and fast. Poor

bastard. I don’t know why I gave a damn, but I did.

Winter set in. The hanging around got harder. I had to buy a thicker coat. Tailing him was

impossible in the snow. The reports were getting skimpier to the point where I was making

stuff up. I hadn’t seen Godwit in a week. It didn’t bode well. I was all out of ideas. Even the

landlady was giving me the cold shoulder. A younger model had moved in down the corridor

with new tricks up his sleeves.

Stopping at a local tobacco shop for the only place in town to get a packet of Mexican Alas

cigarettes. I ran into the Tobacconist. He was blowin’ smoke with the owner. I guess he was a

good customer to have.

‘The usual?’ asked the actual tobacconist.

‘You betcha.’

‘Which conflagration delectation do you favour?’ These dons were always wordy as hell.

‘Alas,’ I said.

‘Alas what?’

‘No, they’re called Alas. Mexican brand.’

‘Mexican?! Why ever would you smoke a cigarette from Mexico?’

‘Because they’re genuine horseshit, that’s why.’

He looked stunned and why the hell wouldn’t he.

‘Here, have a look-see.’ I showed him the illustration on the back of the packet. A cartoon

horse in blue outline and a pile of some steaming horse dung. Genuine Horse Shit Cigarettes

is written above it.

‘Oh my!’

He read out the other the remaining text: ‘Mild. Sweet. Stable blended. Oh, so they’re not

really horseshit!’ He snorted. ‘Why, that’s a jolly good wheeze. Not good enough to tempt

me from my Virginia shag, though,’ he mused, tapping the bowl of his briar. ‘I say, have you

seen that dear fellow, Godwit anywhere? He’s gawn and misplaced himself the past week or

so.’

‘Nope. Reckon he’s done a runner after that Scribe business.’

‘Awfully sad. Messy. Very Godwit.’

‘D’yer think he’s lying low somewhere?’

‘Oh, I expect he’s tottered off to that hut of his.’

‘Hut?’

‘Well, it’s more of a shed really. Hardly habitable from the sound of it. The sort of place one

keeps ones gardening utensils. Lawnmower and such. I’ve never it seen it myself. Not one of

the elect few to be invited thither.’21

‘Perhaps I’ll take a bus out to see it.’

‘Bus? I’m afraid you’ll need a plane! It’s half-way up a mountain in Norway. I imagine it’s

quite frightful at this time of year,’ he said, shuddering at the thought.

Now I knew he wasn’t in his rooms, I decided to sneak in and have nose around the joint. It

looked cold, bare, unlived in. On the desk in the corner where the duck-rabbit should have

been, there was a pile of magazines. Street & Smith. I rifled through them for any papers that

might be lodged in between them. Nothing. I took a few as a going away gift to myself,

thinking maybe their clichés could give me a few tips on how to do my job properly. It was

then that a mark on the desk caught my eye. A duck-rabbit had been carved jaggedly into the

desk with a knife. It gave me the chills. I was back in the nuthouse at Pennhurst again.

I left a note at the dead drop of what was happening and where I was heading and booked a

flight to Norway for the end of the week. I needed winter clothes so I went shopping for

thermals, boots and such. I paid up with the landlady who was barely giving me the time of

day now, packed up my suitcase, and made for the airport in London. Three days later I was

in the small village of Skjolden, which overlooked a copper-green fjord, and was figuring out
my next move. I hit the only bar in the village on my arrival. As I sat at a bar smoking and

drinking the local firewater, a kind of schnapps called akevitt, I struck up a conversation with

an old salt at the bar who called himself Leaf. He knew all about the mad Austrian, had often

sold him coffee and other goods. He took me outside and pointed across the fjord, directly

opposite to where we stood.

‘You see smokings?’

‘Yeah.’

‘He’s up there. In Little Austria.’

‘How long on foot?’

He slapped his thigh and hooted – I took it to be a laugh.

‘Too long! I row you. For packet of American cigarettes.’

‘Will Mexican do?’

‘Deal!’

We clinked glasses of akervitt. It had only taken half a bottle to start tasting nice.

Leaf asked me where I was staying. I said I’d probably sleep where I fell. He laughed. He

offered me a bed. I tried milking him for the skinny on Godwit, but he knew even less than

me. He could tell me what coffee he drank, what bread he ate, but nothing more.

‘We all thinking he is mad.’ It was a common theme.

‘Why?’

‘Building hut in mountains. There is reason we all living down here! But...he work hard. You

will see. Impressive hut. He building it. We help with stone. But he builded it. We admire our

mad Austrian for this.’

We set out early the next morning. My head thumped from the night before. It was minus

stupid outside but the cold had a dry quality to it; my bones didn’t ache like they had done in

England. I saw Leaf packing up an open two-man kayak. Along with the paddles and a

rucksack, he put something else in the hold. Despite the case, I recognised what it was

instantly.

‘I hope you’re not planning on using that on me.’ I nodded towards the item.

‘Nei! Reindeer and bear.’

We set off with both of us paddling. I felt like a phoney Hiawatha but a few sups on Leaf’s

bottle of akervitt and I got into the swing of it.

A little ways into the journey, Leaf piped up. ‘It is a funny. You are not being the first men to

asking of the mad Austrian.’

‘Oh?’

‘Two more asking. But I send them in bad direction.’

‘Why?’

‘Bad accent.’ He spat in the lake to underline his distaste. ‘German. Nazis.’

My mind was racing. So I had company on this crazy fox hunt, eh? Could it be the client? Had

I really been working for Nazis this whole time? They’d mentioned unimaginable wealth. But

plenty of people had money after the war. Still, I was suddenly sittin’ a lot less comfortably in

that kayak. I was packin’ heat of my own but I figured the rifle would be more useful out
here. I took my binoculars out my pack and scoped the lake and hillsides. Nothing doing save

ice and mist.

We were about half way across when the shot rang out. Instinct made me duck for cover. I

called out to Leaf to get down. But he just sat there, his head leaning on his chest. His paddle

dropped into the water. I screwed up my eyes for another look. There was blood bubbling

out the side of his head. The bullet had gone in sideways through his skull. I yelled out

Bastard! then changed it to Bastards! I doubted it was Godwit – it had to be the Nazi scum.

But why Leaf? What had he ever d- . . . It hit me like a sock in the guts from a gorilla. Of

course! A moving target is harder to hit. I’d led them straight to Godwit. All alone in his hut

out here, he was an easy target. They had no further use for me. I was expendable now.

I reached for the rifle, unzipped the leather case, keepin’ my head down. The mist came as a

friend now, not an enemy.22 Once out, I propped the barrel on the side of the kayak and

waited. I spotted another boat about half a click out. Two figures in light grey fatigues came

into view through the sight. Clever. Both wore peaked caps. Both had rifles resting in their

laps and binoculars raised. I let the boat drift, held my breath and watched as one of them

aligned with the cross-hairs. I was too slow. Then the next. I fired before his head was

centred on the cross-hair. The bullet knocked him into a watery grave. His friend was torn

between helping him – clearly pointless – and returning fire. He went for the latter. I ducked

down further and hoped the rolling banks of mist would cover me. A shot whizzed over the

kayak. Then a second. Finally, whoever it was got wise to the fact they was wastin’ lead they

might need later.

I let the tide take the boat on towards the pine-studded mountain where the hut was. The

boat eventually ran aground on a pebble-strewn shore. Leaving the kayak with Leaf in it

banked up on the pebbles, I took the dead man’s rucksack and started to hike up through the

snowy pines to where he’d told me Godwit’s hut was. It was tough goin’. All those gaspers

and horseshit cigarettes hadn’t done my limited climbing skills any favours. On top of that,

the snow was knee-deep in places. So I was almost glad when the sun came out and burned

off the mist, until I remembered that if it was helping me, then it was also helping my

German fanclub. He might make a bee-line for Godwit. He might bump me off first. I say he,

it could just as easily have been the dame on the phone. With that peaked cap pulled down

low, it was impossible to tell. I ducked and weaved between pines as best as I could. It was

like I could feel death’s eyes on me, biding his time, prolonging the exquisite moment before

release: for him, for me. Death was a poet. I knew that better than most. He sometimes

outsourced his labour to me.

I saw the hut in front of me now. I understood why Leaf had called it Little Austria now. It was

more like the kind of chalets they had in Aspen. A cabin. It even had a balcony. I could see

smoke coming out the chimney. Someone was home. Perhaps it was Godwit, perhaps the

remaining Nazi. Or maybe death had got them both and was waiting there with an eternity

of sweet nothings just for me.

I crept up and peered through the windows. It was dark in there. Candlelight. I could see a

fire burning. Something boiling on a stove. And, bent over the kitchen table, there he was,

scribbling away, oblivious to the dangers outside. Typical philosopher. Head in the frickin’

clouds.

I knocked on the door.

‘Scheisse! Gehen Sie weg! Ich bin beschäftigt.’23

‘Professor Godwit, sir. It’s Nix. From Cambridge. We need to talk.’

He gave a pained expression and I heard him approaching the door. When he opened it, he

found a revolver pointing in his face.

He didn’t look phased. ‘Well, hurry up if you’re coming in. You’re letting all the warmth out.’

I crossed the threshold and he closed the door after me. I kept my pistol trained on him.

‘You might wanna lock that,’ I said. ‘And draw the curtains, too.’

‘Why? There’s no one else for miles around.’

‘Tell that to the dead Norwegian I left in the canoe.’

He went pale then. ‘Gott!’

‘You’re a difficult man to track down, Mr. Godwit. How ‘bout you fix us a drink. It’s gonna be

a long night.’

‘Just a tourist, eh? And do you have family in Skjolden, Massachusetts, too?’

‘Touché.’

‘I have only tea,’ said Godwit, heading towards what passed for a kitchen.

‘That’ll do. I got my own firewater for later,’ I said, patting my jacket pocket.

Godwit put the tin kettle on the stove.

I took a seat in the only chair that looked welcoming. It was at the table by the fire where his

papers lay in careful disarray. As my damp feet started the slow process of drying off, I

watched him get busy with his tea-making ritual.

‘No funny business now. I know you was in the army and are handy with a heater.’24

He ignored this. I watched him. He didn’t seem phased at all – not by me nor by my

convincer.25 I had to admit, he was one cold-blooded son of a bitch. It explained the medal

for bravery. He was staring death in the face and the cups didn’t clink once on the saucers as
he brought them over to where I was sat by the fire. It was like he was ready to die. He sat

opposite me and we waited in silence eyeing one another grimly until the kettle spoilt our

staring contest by whistling on the stove.

He came back, filled the pot with hot water, and studied the steam rising from its spout.

‘I’m not the only one out here,’ I said. I wanted to try and rattle him.

‘I heard the shots. I thought it must be hunters. There are plenty at this time of year.’

‘These hunters have a nasty habit of finding men in their line of fire.’

Godwit shuddered.

‘I don’t think it’s me they’re after.’

‘You think they’re after me?’

‘Dead bodies seem to like you, Godwit. Everywhere you go, they turn up.’

The philosopher, his gaze fixed firmly on the teapot, seemed to wince a little. To buy himself

time, he poured out the tea.

‘Sugar?’ he asked.

‘Two lumps.’

‘I suppose you want to know about the duck-rabbit?’

‘You suppose right. Where d’you get it?’

‘Jastrow.’

‘Stolen?’

‘Borrowed, you might say.’

‘How much is it worth?’

‘Not much, I expect. A few hundred? Its value to me is purely symbolic.’

Symbols? What the hell did I know about symbols? This was gettin’ too damn smart for me.

‘I don’t believe you. It has to be worth something. Where is it?’ I jerked the gun at him. I was

tired, hungry and my feet were still wet through. I was through playing games.

He went and fetched it and put it on the table between us. There it was again – the same old

mystery. Two animals, one form.

‘The problem of seeing as, Mr. Nix, haunts me just now. It stays the same yet the mind sees it

as one thing or the other. Never both together.’

I picked it up. It was heavy for porcelain but not solid stone, as it looked. Clever, that. It

wasn’t smooth either, but sort of rumpled all over. Some artisan’s ruse to mimic feathers and

fur. I turned it around in my hands, shook it. There was more than just dust rattling around

inside. I turned it over to look at the base. A narrow slit just wide enough to slip in folded up

paper. Like dollar bills.

‘Not much value, eh?’ I said.

I held it up ready to smash it on the stone floor. Expecting protestations, I got none from

Godwit. He just sat there lookin’ quaint. He’d been in Cambridge too long.

‘Funny. I didn’t have you down as the god-fearin’ type.’

‘For a truly religious man, nothing is tragic.’

‘You should have been a priest. You certainly talk like one.’

He looked at me queerly. ‘The older I grow the more I realize how terribly difficult it is for

people to understand each other, and I think that what misleads one is the fact that they all
look so much like each other. If some people looked like elephants and others like cats, or

fish, one wouldn’t expect them to understand each other and things would look much more

like what they really are.’

‘What’s with the menagerie, Godwit? Elephants? Cats? Fish? Are you outta your mind?’

‘Don’t for heaven’s sake be afraid of talking nonsense. Only don’t fail to pay attention to your

nonsense.’

‘They were right. All of them. You are nuts. You belong in Pennhurst, pal, with all the other

loonies.’

To hell with it all. I smashed the false idol on the floor. The duck-rabbit was a thousand other

things now. In amongst the fragments, there were a folded up piece of paper, vindicating the

violence. I looked over at Godwit. Although his face was gaunt - death-stricken, you might

say, like a cancer sufferer, it seemed calm. Too calm. It was as if whatever was on those

papers couldn’t touch him now. And neither could whoever was hunting him beyond that

locked door.

I picked up the note and began unfolding it. Confessions?

‘Before you read that, you should know one thing.’

‘I’m all ears, Godwit.’

‘Nothing is so difficult as not deceiving oneself.’

A shotgun blast sent wood splintering into the room. The lock was on the floor. I pointed my

gun at the door. A chilly blast swept in and blew some of the candles out. I reached for my

lighter and flicked on the flame. The note was still in my hand. I heard a gun being cocked

and steady footsteps coming towards us. I was torn between the folded-up note and the

intruder. I had to know both but there was no time – no time to know what to do. I brought

the flame close to the notepaper.

‘Judenschwein!’ was screamed out in the dark.26

‘Whatever you do, do not intervene,’ said Godwit, pushing the barrel of my pistol down. He

stood up and turned to face his aggressor. It was hard to see in the flame-lit room but it

looked like he was smiling. Smiling, goddammit!

The incessant footsteps finally stopped. Whoever it was, was keeping their face in the

shadows. All I could see was two barrels of a shotgun.

‘Judenscheisse!’

Godwit, the crazy fool, suddenly made as if to shoot with a gun made out of a thumb and

two fingers. A shot went off instantly. Godwit crumpled in a heap on the floor in front of me.

The intruder cocked the shotgun anew.

‘Good work, Mr. Nix. You would be rewarded handsomely for this.’
It was the dame with the plums in her mouth. Would be. Was that a slip of the tongue or a

mistranslation? Either way, it made me nervous.

She looked at the note. ‘What does it say?’

I looked at the scrawl. It was a single sentence. ‘It says, Tell them I’ve had a wonderful life.’

‘What is its meaning?’ she yelled. She was livid. Her hands gripped the shotgun. She began

pacing up and down. ‘How? How could his filthy kleine Judenschwein life be wunderbar?’

Those plums had turned sour and there was real poison in her voice.

I must have been feeling hysterical with all the death and adrenalin because I could feel a

smile creeping over my lips at the worst possible moment. I did my best to hide it.

‘It means...it means he was right.’

‘Right? About what?’

‘About the duck-rabbit.’ I fired my pistol into the place where her heart should have been.

‘It’s all a matter of aspect, bitch.’27

I didn’t hang around long after that – just long enough to search her body and find the

means of getting my money. Dirty money for sure, but I figured a fee’s a fee. Plus hadn’t I

balanced out the scales of justice by killing my client, a first for me?

Once the dough came through, I headed back to the States.28 The first thing I did was to hang

up a Gone Fishin’ sign on my office. Although I had enough to retire now, I knew I’d get antsy
pretty quick. It was time to take something else up. I was thinking of trying my hand at

spinning a yarn. I reckoned I had enough juice to keep Street & Smith in stories for years.29
 Endnotes

1. The title comes from a postcard written by the philosopher to his English friend and

Cambridge undergraduate Gilbert Pattison, which has ‘Dear Old Blood’ as its

salutation. Ray Monk’s biography on the philosopher is especially instructive here,

revealing that the two men would often exchange nonsense talk together, usually in

relation to the adjective ‘bloody’, a word which the philosopher seems to have found

endlessly funny. Postcards were often signed off in a similar fashion: ‘Your bloodily’

and ‘Yours in bloodiness’. Removed from this context and used as a title, the phrase

‘Dear Old Blood’ takes on a paradoxical tone, at once sinister and endearing. The

reader may wonder if the title is self-referential and perhaps confessional in intent, or

whether it is still addressed to some unknown other. Either way, the darker tone

seems somehow appropriate for a late work and gives the first indication of a radical

shift in approach by the philosopher, one that draws on the genre conventions of

hardboiled noir fiction.

2. The name Nix is possibly a play on the German word Nichts which means nothing,

and is immediately suggestive of Wittgenstein’s philosophical enquiries into what can

and cannot be meaningfully asked and answered. In so doing, he was undermining

the canon of metaphysical enquiry concerning truth, the nature of reality, the

existence of God, etc. that have troubled philosophers for two millennia. For

Wittgenstein, such problems were non-existent, merely the bewitchment of language

fooling people into thinking such metaphysical puzzles were real. With this in mind,
 we might ponder what Wittgenstein might be trying to show by calling his detective

Nix?

3. Wittgenstein has cleverly chosen the opening line of his only published work

Tractatus-Logicus Philosophicus (1921) to set up the premise for his mystery, ‘The

world is everything that is the case’, transposing it into the hardboiled noir genre

through the multiple meanings of the word ‘case’. This is typical of the tone adopted

by his private investigator, which emulates the quick-fire wordplay of Raymond

Chandler’s Philip Marlowe, and is maintained consistently throughout. Thus, a

philosopher becomes rather ingeniously a ‘wise guy’.

4. A brief examination of the similarities between philosophy and detective work may

be helpful at this juncture. Both professions involving making metaphysical enquiries

into the nature of truth and require an a priori belief in free will, for who could be

found guilty of any crime in a wholly deterministic universe? One useful way of

demonstrating the proximity between the two vocations is by a simple methodology

of substitution, taking statements that the philosopher Wittgenstein made regarding

his work and replacing the word philosopher with detective, philosophy with detective

work, and any variants thereof. So, a journal entry from 1st May 1915 becomes: It is

one of the chief skills of the detective not to occupy himself with questions which do

not concern him. A list of further examples follows:

i. One of the most difficult of the detective’s task is to find out where the shoe

pinches.
 ii. Detective work is not a theory but an activity. Detective work consists

essentially of elucidations.

iii. The difficulty in detective work is to say no more than we know.

iv. Detective work is like trying to open a safe with a combination lock: each little

adjustment of the dials seems to achieve nothing, only when everything is in

place does the door open.

v. Detective work is: rejecting false arguments.

vi. The detective strives to find the liberating word, that is, the word that finally

permits us to grasp what up to now has intangibly weighed down upon our

consciousness.

vii. Detective work is a battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by

means of our language.

It might be productive then to think of the work at hand as an amalgam of these two

fields, a philosophy of detection.

5. In this second section, which surely merits the name ‘chapter’ given its sequential fit,

Wittgenstein reworks a notorious dispute with his old philosophical sparring partner,

the Italian economist Piero Sraffa. Norman Malcolm’s memoirs reveal the

contemptuous Neapolitan gesture Sraffa is supposed to have given Wittgenstein –

brushing his fingertips under his chin towards his interlocutor, demanding of him,

‘What is the logical form of that?’ Fuck off, perhaps. Sraffa must have been pretty

irked with him because he ended their regular discussions despite the philosopher’s

pleadings. In spite of this, the Austrian later paid homage to the Italian economist in
 the introduction to Philosophical Investigations. There is undoubtedly a magnanimity

in Wittgenstein acknowledging his indebtedness to Sraffa years later for his stimulus,

his extraordinary generosity going so far as to thank him for the most consequential

ideas in the book. Parenthetically, there was a minor brouhaha about Sraffa’s

Neapolitan gesture in the letters section of the TLS lasting several weeks a few years

back. It could be argued that it was precisely this sort of pedantry that compelled

Wittgenstein to complain of the ‘stifling English civilisation’ and to leave Cambridge in

1948 which had become hateful to him. In a letter he complains of ‘the stiffness, the

artificiality, the self-satisfaction on the people’. One gets a sense of this ‘stifling’

claustrophobic milieu in his image of being ‘stuck inside a cucumber sandwich’, a

metaphor at once humorous and culturally-barbed. The Austrian has a reputation for

being the littérateur’s philosopher, and one can certainly see a study in the poetics of

Wittgenstein becoming some academic’s golden goose before too long, if it hasn’t

already.

6. English Mustard is David Pinsent, Wittgenstein’s first platonic lover. A brilliant

mathematics scholar and talented pianist, qualities which brought the two men

together. Pinsent accompanied the philosopher on trips to Iceland and Norway at

Wittgenstein’s expense. During the First World War, Pinsent became a test pilot and

was killed in an flying accident in May 1918. The story is accurate here: the plane

broke up into five sections and his body was never recovered. Wittgenstein was in

Austria when he received news of Pinsent’s death in a letter written from his mother.

It came as a tremendous blow to him and he wrote back describing David as ‘my first

and my only friend’. Writing to Russell in 1920, he still felt the loss: ‘Every day I think
 of Pinsent. He took half my life away with him.’ His only published work , the

Tractatus, is dedicated to Pinsent.

7. What becomes apparent in this chapter is that the philosopher is mining his own life

for material in a rather transparent way. Here the dividends of using a proxy narrator

become clear, allowing the author a quasi-objectivity on his actions and motives

therein. He shadows his younger self as he drifts around the Cambridge of his youth,

mapping former haunts, encountering old companions, creating a cartography of

choices in the process. He turns to the past like a detective would a cold case, pouring

over for clues as to how his present came to be the way it is. Where did all his

philosophical enquiry get him? Is there a solution to this question or is it meaningless

to even ask? It is an investigation that requires a new mode of enquiry, a philosophy

of detection. Wittgenstein is taking the noir genre deeper into the existential territory

it already occupies. The narrative risks are considerable, as is the psychological toll

such imaginative endeavours must take on their author.

8. The story of the Cambridge Apostles comprises a long and tangled history of

masculine genius, platonic and homoerotic love, spy rings, and prestigious positions

in public life. The Apostles is a society of Cambridge intelligentsia first founded in

1820 and originally called The Cambridge Conversazione Society. The name ‘Apostles’

derives from the 12 founding members who met to discuss metaphysical questions.

As with any secret society, there are somewhat ludicrous rigmarole for being

admitted to its precocious bosom. For instance, in Wittgenstein’s day, membership

was an arcane process of being nominated and elected unanimously by existing

 members in secret. Only successful candidates became aware they were members.

During Wittgenstein’s tenure at Cambridge, when he was under the wing of leading

Apostle and philosopher of mathematics, Bertrand Russell, he was inveigled into this

viper’s nest of pseudo-intellectual posturing and its occult practises: the fat

leather-bound tome known as The Book in which minutes of meetings were kept

(such titillating moral debates as ‘Why laugh?’ Answer: ‘Why not?’); the stowing away

of the book in a wooden chest, The Ark, which had been designed especially for this

ritualistic purpose. Many of soi-disant greats of 20th Century British public life were

members, including the aforementioned Russell, the economist John Maynard

Keynes, philosopher GE Moore, and writer and critic Lytton Strachey.

9. The Schubert lieder is interesting. Monk informs me that he used to whistle them

while Pinsent played the piano.

10. The Philosopher Kings is a clever and wry twinning of Plato and his Cambridge

contemporaries, Bertrand Russell and GE Moore. Both receive disparaging thumbnail

sketches here. Indeed, the references in this chapter reveal the emergence of a more

waspish tone, one that cavils at the academic intrigues and incestuous nature of

Cambridge life. Is Wittgenstein here attempting to purge a latent bitterness or

resentment about his treatment there?

11. There has been much speculation over precisely which issues of Street & Smith’s

Detective Story Magazine Wittgenstein actually read that summer. Horace

Murgatroyd of Princeton’s Philosophy Department has long believed it to be the April

issue. In a paper in 2004 for The Wittgensteinian, he claimed to have performed a

qualitative corpus analysis of the extant letters from 29 April 1948 through to August

when the philosopher moved to Dublin, and found word patterns commensurate

with the influence of stories featured in the April issue. This has been ferociously

disputed by Cowper (2005), Mercanto (2006) and Frooshberger (2010) among others.

My own preference is for the July issue for the following reasons. In the late 1940s,

Street & Smith’s Detective Story Magazine front covers were moving away from the

usual vivid hand-drawn illustrations, the terrified blondes and gun-toting hoodlums in

Trilbies and raincoats, branching out into a more abstract aesthetic. By 1947, Salvador

Dali’s surrealism is visible in a disembodied female head lying beside train tracks in a

desert. An artist’s articulated wooden mannequin lies across the tracks which trail off

into a vanishing point between a pyramid and the Sphinx. Another issue from that

year shows a willow tree in silhouette shedding playing cards instead of leaves. The

covers from early 1948 maintain this surrealism but by the spring the influence of the

avant-garde and the geometric shapes of painters such as Kazimir Malevich emerges.

Given that Wittgenstein complained about hearing ‘machinery’ even in his beloved

Brahms’s music, would Malcolm have risked igniting his ire by sending him magazines

flaunting such modernist touches? Wittgenstein was in the Rosro cottage from May

to August 1948, but this needn’t mean contemporaneous issues of Street & Smith

were sent to him. It could be that Malcolm sent a whole pile, as he sometimes did to

Cambridge, although Wittgenstein had responded to one such glut that ‘one

magazine a month is ample’; any more prevented him from ‘doing philosophy’. The

contents pages of these magazines reveal the potboiler nature of this ‘hard-boiled’

fiction. Death is omnipresent. The Unlamented Corpse. Murder Plays Cupid. Dead
Men in White. In the January 1948 issue, Death not only Takes A Bow and Wears

Feathers, he also reveals his Hands, and possesses a Bright Angel in four separate

stories. And yet it is precisely the death-saturated atmosphere of the July issue that I

find so persuasive a fit. Its cover harking back to the illustrative tropes of yore in an

almost postmodern way (Fig. 1). Generic elements are dotted across an inky plane

that is segmented by white lines of perspective: a wind-warped tree; a gravestone; a

shovel. A midnight blue sky mushrooms ominously out of the horizon. The gloom is

broken up by a couple of huge pink and yellow roses which take centre stage, as it

were. Looking at it now, the elements all link up: the roses appear to have been lain

on the grave that has been freshly-dug beneath the tree. The stories listed on the

cover reflect this morbidity: In Case of Death, Already Buried, Specialists in Death.

Isn’t the philosopher-noir author a philosopher-detective solving his own murder

whilst digging his own grave in this text? Regardless of Murgatroyd’s repeated

assertions for April, one can almost imagine Wittgenstein’s copy of the July Street &

Smith wearing his fingerprints like white tattoos, the life smudges of a heavy rotation

of readings.
 Fig. 1

But why detective story magazines and their hardboiled fiction? As hitherto

mentioned, there are pertinent parallels between philosophy and detective work, so

that we might begin to speak of a philosophy of detection. One need only ponder its

particular methodology of investigation, the piecemeal accumulation of clues,

evidence, intuitions, the long-hours grind of stakeouts and shadowing tails through

city streets, the interrogations and second-guessing, and using all this information to

forge a map that leads to the solution, to find ample correspondences. Wittgenstein

wrote of the grain of wisdom that could be found in detective stories and which was

sorely lacking from the articles in the academic philosophical journal, Mind.
12. This is a reference to Wittgenstein’s conservative musical tastes. He seems to have

favoured the Classical and Romantic composers such as Beethoven and Bruckner, but

complained that in Brahms one could already hear the sound of machines. The

wealthy Wittgenstein household was a champion of the arts in Vienna before the war,

and composers such as Gustav Mahler were regular guests. The family itself were

musical and Ludwig’s brother, Paul, became a famous concert pianist. Even after

losing his arm in the war, music was often composed especially for him, such as

Ravel’s Piano Concerto for the Left Hand. Wittgenstein had perfect pitch and was a

gifted whistler, able to recite whole symphonic movements from memory, and this

musical facility finds its way into the noir story in a natural and rather ingenious way.

13. Wittgenstein is known to have been working on the problems of Gestalt as in early

1947 (see Monk, 2006) and a definition from the Oxford English Dictionary may be

instructive here: A ‘shape’, ‘configuration’, or ‘structure’ which as an object of

perception forms a specific whole or unity incapable of expression simply in terms of

its parts (e.g. a melody in distinction from the notes that make it up). Wittgenstein

used the duck-rabbit image to illustrate the philosophical problem in his lectures. It is

an ambiguous image – although there is only one image, the mind sees it as either a

duck or a rabbit but never both at once. The reader will have no doubt already

experienced this for themselves. In the Philosophical Investigations published

posthumously, Wittgenstein reveals he encountered the image in the American

psychologist Joseph Jastrow’s work, Fact and Fable in Psychology (1900). The

duck-rabbit has since gone on to lead a cultural life of its own, as, inter alia, a

children’s book; a craft brewery; and a film production company. Here it features as a
 plot device, whether a straight-out MacGuffin or something more elusive, will

become apparent later in the text. Although one wonders whether this poor beast

hasn’t suffered enough ignominy through the caprices of capitalism, Wittgenstein

could not have foreseen the usurpation of this illusory creature into neoliberal’s

all-encompassing bosom. Indeed, it could be argued that, like the duck-rabbit,

Wittgenstein has become an object of study, a brand. Wittgenstein™: a name that

shifts units. The academy must be willing to admit its share of the blame for such

rampant commodification.

14. I shall go mad. That way madness lies. These lines from King Lear, a play the

philosopher was well-acquainted with, could equally be applied to Wittgenstein at

this moment. The Austrian seems to have been fearful of madness in much the same

way that Lear was. As shall be seen, these black threads are the warp to the noir weft

of the narrative texture. Monk suggests the philosopher suffered from indigestion,

anxiety and guilt during his stay at Rosro, all of which could have provoked the

creation of his detective story. As a sufferer of indigestion myself, I know the milk

Tommy Mulkerrins brought him would only have made his dyspepsia worse. The

purgative aspects of the noir, however, might well have proved remedially efficacious

in some respects. But could not the very fear of madness, an inevitable corollary of

the prolonged mental abstraction necessary in philosophical thought, have been

enough to provoke a ‘ghost madness’ which finds voice in Dear Old Blood? And have

not various recent papers (Lurbynsky and Jodd 2012, Goossens and Teinemann 2013)

forged a counter-narrative, reading into the Wittgenstein corpus the genealogical

propensity for suicide in male members of the family (including a lifelong

 contemplation of suicide by Ludwig himself), as well as a repressed trauma of the

fraternal incidences of suicide, that necessarily pervades the philosophical work at

some level, even in its lack? My own research into the negation of other traumatic

events in his life – Pinsent’s sudden death; the failed engagement with a Swiss

woman, Marguerite Respinger; the child cruelty dished out in a Swiss primary school;

etc. may account for the maddening guilt that the distance and longueurs of Rosro life

could have provoked into manifestation. Such readings expose the abyss between

word and event, a traumatic void of that which cannot find utterance and only be

lived, endured. Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent. How different

that phrase reads in the light of such counter-narratives, and now in the light of this

noir detective story. The psychological self-violence of repression is condemned to

re-emerge tangentially, and finds the form of fiction to express itself. Naturally,

Murgatroyd et al have disputed these novel interpretations of Wittgenstein’s oeuvre

vehemently (see Wittgensteinians passim), almost as if their very professorial tenure

depended upon it. One can only hope that they will reconsider their positions in the

light of the discovery of Dear Old Blood. To not do so – well, that way madness lies.

15. The line is also from King Lear and said by the aged king as he rages at his malicious

daughters, Regan and Goneril,

16. The poker relates to an infamous heated argument between Wittgenstein and the

visiting Philosopher of Science Karl Popper at the Cambridge University Moral

Sciences Club in 1946. Popper had been invited there to deliver a paper entitled ‘Are

There Philosophical Problems?’. During the ensuing debate, Wittgenstein used a

 poker to emphasise his points and gesticulated with it angrily, something which the

visiting professor found objectionable. Popper later claimed that when challenged,

Wittgenstein had thrown down the poker and stormed out in a rage. The incident has

received its fullest treatment in Wittgenstein’s Poker by David Edmonds & John

Eidinow (2001).

17. This is a direct quotation from Rendezvous With Fear, Wittgenstein’s favourite

hardboiled detective novel. It is said by the P.I. Doan to his large dog Carstairs, a Great

Dane. The novel was written by Norbert Davis and in the summer of 1948, the

philosopher wrote to Malcolm in America mentioning he had found a copy in a

village, finding it a “queer coincidence” given his rural situation. He mentions

rereading it and liking it so much that he wished to write and convey his gratitude to

Davis. He asks Malcolm to seek out any other books by this American author

although, with a typically grim cynicism, he raises the possibility that even if he has

written others, Rendezvous With Fear might be the only good one.

18. The use of italics is curious here. It suggests an authorial intervention in the text

which has not happened explicitly up to this point. ‘Trenches of the mind’ recalls and

inverts the 19th Century poet Gerard Manley Hopkins’s ‘mountains of the mind’ and

seems to suggest a philosophical warfare dug out from his time at the front with the

Austro-Hungarian army in the First World War. His notebooks testify that it was here

that the Tractatus took shape.

19. In the Tractatus, he believed he had solved the riddle of philosophy, and that anyone

who read it and understood it would see as he did, that there are no meaningful

philosophical problems, only the mistaken appearance of such. He ends the work

memorably by suggesting that his book is like a ladder that can be thrown away once

the reader has climbed up it. Last of all comes a line that is now excised and used in

all manner of inappropriate contexts: Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must

be silent. Like Adorno’s remarks on poetry after Auschwitz, modern life conspires to

grind these phrases into meaninglessness through an over familiarity borne of

misuse. Among competing modern views of Wittgenstein, that of Paul Horwich sees

his philosophy as metaphilosophy i.e. philosophy about philosophy. This view

perceives his corpus as examining the limits of language, considering the difference

between ordinary language use and philosophical usage. Some go so far as to

describe his work as antiphilosophy: anti-theoretical, mistrustful of a priori causes,

perceiving metaphysical conundrums as misconceptions, merely the bewitchment of

language, which cannot be answered meaningfully, only dissolved therapeutically.

Today, the Linguistic Turn lies in ruins, abandoned like the disembodied feet of

Ozymandias in the desert of time. Its polysyllabic enquiries have been cruelly

abbreviated by the academy’s Speculative Turn. Realism is writ large in every paper.

Object-oriented scholars contest terms such as ontic, ontology and, improbably,

ontologicality – linguistic terms all! – and fashion their own neologisms for good

measure, such as interobjectivity and neo-vitalism. This is not the place to lament

such developments but it is wearying to bear witness daily to such acts of academic

desecration. How far we have come from Wittgenstein’s simple plea for quietism:

Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.

20. Pennhurst is a psychiatric hospital in Pennhurst, Pennsylvania. It was originally known

as the Eastern Pennsylvania State Institution for the Feeble-Minded and Epileptic and

has garnered a reputation for the cruel abuse meted out to its patients. The asylum

was finally shut down in December 1987. How Wittgenstein knew of the hospital is

still unclear. It may have been mentioned in a story in a copy of Street & Smith.

21. The hut being described by Russell as ‘the sort of place one keeps one’s gardening

utensils’ i.e. a shed, was actually no such thing, as this photo shows. Either this was

what Wittgenstein imagined Russell perceived it to be, or it is a private joke. However,

as the photo shows, the prospect of the house overlooking the fjord is accurately

described in the story.

22. ‘…as a friend, not an enemy’ is a reworking of a diary entry from June 29, 1948

written at Rosro Cottage: ‘Don't let grief vex you. You should let it into your heart. Nor

should you be afraid of madness. It comes to you perhaps as a friend and not as an

enemy, and the only thing that is bad is your resistance.’ To my mind, this is as clinical

a proof as any in the text that the work is Wittgenstein’s, for it reveals not only his

depressed state of mind that summer, but also how hardboiled fiction could serve as

both a confessional of and vehicle for his grief. The story becomes a private

investigation into the self and the way his life was lived.

23. Shit! Go away! I'm busy.

24. Heater = noir slang for a gun.

25. Convincer = noir slang for a gun.

26. Wittgenstein returns us to the notion of Gestalt at the end, an idea which the

philosopher has applied to his life, enabling him to make that final utterance. Of

course, his genius is such that a pleasing ambiguity remains. Has he deceived himself

in choosing to see his life as a lucky rabbit and not a lame duck? In his brave

submission to death, there are overtones of a journal entry from 1946: ‘A hero looks

death in the face, real death, not just the image of death. Behaving honourably in a

crisis doesn't mean being able to act the part of a hero well, as in the theatre, it

means being able to look death itself in the eye. For an actor may play lots of

different roles, but at the end of it all he himself, the human being, is the one who

has to die.’

27. The Nazi theme, hinted at previously, becomes ramified in the Judenschwein insult. It

could result from the guilt Wittgenstein may have felt in avoiding the humiliating

escape his sister had to make at the hands of the Fascists in Austria. It is surely linked

to the confession regarding his wilful occlusion of his Jewish ancestry, something that

becomes ironic if Monk is correct and he is mistaken about these roots.

28. His detective Nix returns to the States with his tainted loot from his work – a classic

noir touch – hangs up his gumshoes, and, perhaps inspired by the copies Street &

Smith he has taken from Godwit’s rooms, ponders turning his own experiences into

stories for the same magazine. It is a distinctly satisfying conclusion.

29. Despite Murgatroyd’s voluble protestations to the contrary, Wittgenstein’s implicit

love of the noir genre did find an explicit avenue for philosophical enquiry, as this

extraordinary trove of documents amply demonstrates. It is my sincere hope that this

book will serve as a vade mecum for future generations of academics, enabling them

to revisit the Wittgenstein archive in search of earlier instances of the philosophy of

detection that he clearly practised.

 Afterword

In this second edition, I wish to address several false and grossly damaging allegations that

have been made in relation to this text. Although these contemptible assertions do not

merit serious consideration, made as they have been by a veritable battalion of rogue

academics (captained, unsurprisingly, by the seemingly irrepressible self-styled ‘radical

philosopher’ Horace Murgatroyd), not to refute them would only further endanger the

trusting relationship I have built up with the general reader over many years. These

accusations suggest indirectly that Dear Old Blood may be a literary hoax and is the product

of a mind so desperate for scholarly acclaim as to be “possibly deranged”. My lawyers assure

me that the clever use of circumlocution and insinuation make these defamatory claims

ineligible for the libel I hold them to be. Aside of the not inconsiderable damage done to my

academic reputation, most worrying of all for Wittgenstein scholasticism is the fundamental

refusal of Murgatroyd et al to give credence to the existence of a hardboiled noir-style

detective story called Dear Old Blood. Whilst they refer to the distinct possibility of a “Rosro

haul” of notes pertaining to his Philosophical Investigations, the notion that he may have

spent the summer of 1948 composing his own detective story is thought to be “too

preposterous to be taken seriously”. Be that as it may, they “condescend” to engage critically

with the “hoax” in order to demonstrate its “transparent inauthenticity”. I am thus forced to

adopt a similar condescension in refuting some of the glaring errors they have made in

relation to the text.

 Murgatroyd avers in a paper in The Wittgensteinian (Issue 112 Summer 2014) entitled

‘Dear Old Truth – Against the Scholarly Hoax’ that there are several anachronisms that

immediately allow him to disavow the veracity of the Rosro find. He argues that the use of

the philosopher’s own gravestone as the dead letter box enabling communication between

the private investigator Nix and his client fundamentally undermines the validity of the

document. It soon becomes clear that Murgatroyd is reading into this gravestone his own

biases and desires to prove the text false. As Murgatroyd would surely know if it had visited

the cemetery in question, the gravestone chosen is quite typical of the style to be found in

the former St Giles Cemetery and now Ascension Parish Burial Ground. Furthermore, if he

were to roam further afield than the short distance between his wing-back Chesterfield

armchair and the sherry decanter, he would note that this simple type of grave marker is

relatively common in Anglican churches across the country. Murgatroyd then ramifies his

point by criticising the method of communication that exists in this dead drop between Nix

and his client. The use of pennies, Murgatroyd claims, is “clearly” lifted from a photo freely

available online (see Fig.1), and which originates on the “notoriously weak” academic source,

the online encyclopaedia Wikipedia.org. Murgatroyd’s lack of self-awareness comes to the

fore here, since his own point relies on the very source he claims to be “notoriously weak”.

Murgaroyd’s obsession with this “damning evidence” continues in his citation of a letter on

the same webpage, written to The Times on 3rd September 2001:

Today there were 18 1p coins on the grave of Ludwig Wittgenstein at the Parish of the

Ascension Burial Ground in Cambridge. Originally - some days ago - there were four,

spread about; and then five in a little pile to one side. This morning there were 15

neatly underlining his name. Now there are three more, still neatly lined up. Over the
 years numerous small objects have been placed on the grave including a lemon, a pork

pie, a Mr Kipling cupcake and a Buddhist prayer wheel. It is all very intriguing.

But the appearance of coins and sundry other votive offerings only strengthen not

undermine their appearance in Dear Old Blood. Miscellaneous items have been and continue

to be left at this gravestone over time, as they are on surrounding gravestones. If the story

had made use of the small wooden ladder, he would have greater cause to doubt the

authenticity of these documents. But it does not. Pennies have long been used as

extemporaneous votive offerings to the dead. No academic should need reminding of the

classical allusion to ‘paying the ferryman’ manifest in such coins – it is the living’s only way of

ensuring safe passage across the Styx for the dead, though Murgatroyd’s ignorance of this

possible reference suggests that he does require it. I now consider this point refuted.

Fig. 1
 In addition, Murgatroyd heralds the appearance of Nazis in the “hoax” text as

rendering the text more ‘saleable’, referring to Nazi historian Richard J Evans’s assertion that

people are still “obsessed” with the Nazis.2 Murgatroyd suggests that, even if the text was

authentic, Wittgenstein would not have written about Nazis, given how his family suffered at

their hands. Surely this is precisely why he would have written about them? If the story is, as

I believe, an exercise in self-absolution, the painful excision of life-long tormenting guilt, and

perhaps even, philosophically, a confession qua confession, then why would he turn away

from this episode in his family’s life? Already, his admissions to Fania Pascal et al reveal his

anguish in having denied his perceived Jewishness.

Finally, Mugratroyd ends his paper with a theatrical flourish, firstly by finding fault

with what he labels a “pre-emptive” Horatian epigraph, before retorting with one of his own

from the Roman poet’s Ars Poetica: ‘Fictions meant to amuse should be close to reality’.

Never one for understatement, the tireless philosopher then quotes Wittgenstein experto

crede back at me: If you are unwilling to know what you are, your writing is a form of deceit.

As much as this may chagrin my colleague, these epigraphs were chosen to reflect

thematically the work at hand, as is the nature of epigraphs. Thus, Horace bespeaks fortitude

in the face of adversity. Did not Wittgenstein spend his entire philosophical life arguing

against philosophy as it is traditionally understood in the form of metaphysical enquiry? The

refutation of the existence of philosophical problems as such put him at odds not just with

his entire profession, but with his own academic vocation. What better quotation, then, than

the Horace to voice the moral strength needed to endure such daily internal conflict?

Murgatroyd's second flourish – the Wittgenstein quote – is, I take it, meant to address the

first epigraph, ‘A picture held us captive…’. Both merely bolster the point I have just made

2
See Why are we obsessed with the Nazis? in The Guardian, 6th February 2015
regarding the kind of anti-philosophy that Wittgenstein was engaged in, the intellectual

strain therein, as well as the moral necessity he saw in pursuing this line of thought.

Wittgenstein’s notions on self-deceit acknowledge that even his meta-philosophical

disavowal of philosophical problems could itself result from the bewitchment of language.

This is the intellectual maze he entered knowing that there might be no way out. A

philosophical dead-end. I believe that he found that exit in the detective fiction he wrote at

Rosro Cottage in the summer of 1948 entitled Dear Old Blood, and no amount of vituperative

attacks will prevent me from arguing that this is the case.

It should also be noted that Murgatroyd cites Deleuze and Guattari twice in his paper,

a pair of pseudo-philosophers from the Continental school. In some academic circles, this

would already be justification enough for his dossier on me to be viewed with the utmost

suspicion.
 Critical Commentary

Dear Old Blood is remarkable in many ways, perhaps no more so than in how authentic it

feels. Maybe a collective desire for it to be genuine has helped convince the academic world

and general public for so long that it was. Such is the brilliance of Herbert Denk’s act of

mendacity that I expect some people will always continue to believe in its legitimacy. Of

course, there have been literary hoaxes before – one thinks inevitably of the Scottish Bard

Ossian, concocted by James Macpherson in the 18th Century, or the more recent literary

scandals aroused by the forged memoirs of James Frey and JT Leroy – but there is an

especially peculiar genius at work in Dear Old Blood. A purely fictional archival find is

presented to the unsuspecting reader with traditional academic paraphernalia: a forward,

endnotes and commentaries, an afterword and an appendix. Buttressed thus by a seemingly

rigorous scholarly framework, it serves itself up as an iron-clad truth. Yet, as I will

demonstrate, all these accessories are entirely self-serving, a façade masking the untruth at

the heart of the work. The references it comes cloaked in are often no more than

pre-emptive strikes against any possible doubters. Indeed, I am the principal target of these

oft-barbed rebuttals, having spent the past few years contesting the authenticity of Denk’s

supposed discovery. The present book was provisionally entitled The Man Loaded With

Mischief in order to use the very tools wielded by the hoaxer against them, in this instance

the name of a public house in the story which was no longer extant when Wittgenstein

resided in Cambridge. Surely any person who concocts such a Byzantine ruse must be loaded

with a desire to make mischief, and Denk is that person. What he hoped to gain by his fraud

is as dark a mystery as any noir in the canon, and I have my own theories regarding this

riddle.
 So who is Herbert Denk? The biography is sketchy and concrete records have proved

very hard to come by. I have been able to trace a brief chronology. Born in 1977 to Bertold

and Hannah Denk, he was a child prodigy who was home-schooled. He appears to have

studied philosophy from an early age and although an H. Denk appears on the student role of

Bonn University, Friedrich Nietzsche’s alma mater, around about the time when Denk was

likely to have matriculated, there is no corroborating evidence to suggest this was Herbert

Denk. The record goes blank for several decades until 2012 and the appearance of a paper in

the esteemed academic journal The Wittgensteinian published under the name Herbert

Denk. The paper entitled ‘Hardboiled Propositions: Wittgenstein and the Philosophy of

Detection’. The brief biographical entry in the front matter suggests he is a freelance

philosopher with no academic tenure or professorial chair to his name. One wonders how he

convinced so esteemed an organ as The Wittgensteinain to accept his submission. This article

generated a decent standard of epistolary discussion among the usual Wittgenstein scholars

in subsequent issues, and nothing was heard again from Denk until a letter in the Winter

2013 issue from him posits the idea that there he now has concrete proof to support his

theory with more to follow. Dear Old Blood: Notes on a Wittgenstein Noir appeared the

following spring and my paper regarding its authenticity in the next issue.

Until recently, this was where the story ended but I am happy to report that new findings

have uncovered more information relating to the events leading up to the book’s publication.

This has required a fresh scholastic approach, resulting in a sort of forensic psychological

excavation of the Denk archive. In order to understand the hoaxer, it was first necessary to

understand the rationale behind the hoax, with all the inherent dangers such mental

cartography carries. Why would Herbert Denk have gone to such efforts to deceive the
academic community and general reading public? Wittgenstein, after all, is becoming ever

more recognisable as a thinker and now has his own literary canon: Wittgenstein’s Nephew

(Thomas Bernhard); Wittgenstein’s Mistress (David Markson); Wittgenstein Jr. (Lars Iyer) to

name but three. The abstruse nature of his thought and the extreme asceticism of his life

merely add to the appeal. He remains an enigma. His is the sort of ‘troubled genius’ that

Hollywood makes biopics of and which overweening actors win Oscars for playing. Could it

be that Denk merely wished to surf this wave of popularity? Did he think he could cling to

the coattails of all that mystery and eccentricity all the way to the box office? Or is Denk a

genuine amateur academic who only sought a seat at the table in the cloistered world of the

academy? One possibility I have been pursuing is that Denk is a UK-based scholar who is

feeling the pinch of the new Research Excellence Framework (REF) and its perverse focus on

somehow measuring the ‘impact’ of research. This quantitative approach – what some in the

community are calling the ‘neoliberalisation’ of higher education – is a lamentable

development for the humanities, which by its very nature is inimical to metrics-based

assessment. Another aspect of the REF is how it flattens academic publishing so that an

article and a book are accorded the same weight. This new burden only adds to the

increasing pressure all academics feel to churn out papers so that the university can boast of

being home to ‘4-star’ research that is ‘world-leading in originality, significance and rigour’.

This pressure comes internally from the expectations and competition to be found within

every university as well as externally, for who all academic work now exists in an instantly

global dimension. The oft-forgotten dark side of the digital humanities is that paper-writing

has become an almost industrial process and certain notorious websites, which both host

these papers and announce newly-uploaded contributions through instant email

notifications, can have a negative impact on the mental health of the modern scholar. Was

this the case with Denk?

Occasionally in scholarship, just as you are pursuing one line of enquiry, the results of your

research are capable of sending you in a wholly unexpected direction. The parallels with

detective work are not lost on me. So it was recently when I made an interesting discovery

that potentially casts the hoax in a new light. I now believe that Denk was partly inspired by

Professor Arthur Gibson’s trove of the so-called pink notebook reported in The Guardian on

26 April 2011. The article, entitled Lost archive shows Wittgenstein in a new light, heavily

emphasised the riches of this ‘untapped, lost archive’, how it provides ‘fresh insights into the

philosopher’s minds’ and ‘shines a fascinating light’ on the relationship with his amanuensis,

Francis Skinner. Gibson speaks of how ‘stunned’ he was by the find and his astonishment at

the insights it offered into the philosopher’s thought processes, going so far as to say ‘you’re

almost peering into his mind’. In May 2013, he gave a detailed account of what this new

‘Wittgenstein-Skinner Archive’ had so far yielded in Philosophy at Cambridge journal, which

was subsequently reproduced in the British Wittgenstein Society (BWS) newsletter.3 Gibson is

still working on a book of the find (the forthcoming Ludwig Wittgenstein: Dictating

Philosophy to Francis Skinner).

The BWS represented a high-water mark of Wittgenstein scholarship for Denk with its annual

conference and biannual lecture series and he used them as a platform for his philosophy of

detection theories regarding the philosopher. Having painstakingly laid down these

foundations, he then approached them with the news that his theories had now been

substantiated through an unprecedented find in County Galway, Ireland: a manuscript

3
See British Wittgenstein Society newsletter No. 18.
written in Wittgenstein’s hand, in English, and which appeared to be a hardboiled detective

story. Denk believed this to be the notes that Tommy Mulkerrins was supposed to have

helped Wittgenstein destroy in the fire at Rosro Cottage. In his email, Denk states that, since

the notes came wrapped in a sheet of green oilcloth, Denk had named it the ‘green book’,

cleverly suggesting a shared lineage with the Brown and Blue Books of lecture notes already

published; the Pink Book recovered by Gibson; and a missing Yellow Notebook linked to

conversations he had with the philosopher Tatiana Gornshteyn on a visit to Leningrad in

1935. In an astute touch, Denk compares his decision to publish the notes rather than

consign them oblivion as akin to Max Brod’s editorial decision to ignore the wishes of Franz

Kafka, who had also stipulated that his manuscripts be destroyed after his death. Denk

argues that just as a Twentieth Century without The Trial is now unimaginable, so will a

Twenty-First Century without Dear Old Blood, at least for Wittgenstein scholars. It is an

enormously grandiose claim and perhaps it was this egotistical overreach that made the BWS

Executive Committee get in touch with myself regarding Denk’s purported find. I immediately

raised my suspicions and suggested that they delay any announcements pending further

enquiries. I felt compelled to cite several particularly egregious instances of revisionism Denk

had already exhibited in The Wittgensteinian.

On the strength of my word alone, Denk’s membership was immediately annulled. This

must surely have rankled with Denk, but I felt duty bound by the ethics of my position

within the academy. Remaining silent was never an option. Denk subsequently worked his

way through the other Wittgenstein Societies, presumably ranking them by the location he

felt would carry the most academic heft. Thus, the Austrian, North American and Nordic

societies were all approached; all rebuffed his advances once word of his BWS annulment
got out. Denk was forced to go further afield, approaching the Indian and Chinese

Wittgenstein Societies. It may seem strange to the reader that such exotic locales should

pay host to Wittgenstein devotees, but both are countries in which profound philosophical

traditions have existed for as long as that in the west, if not longer. If Denk thought that he

could prey on some naivety he presumably imagined resided in the East, he was sadly

mistaken. In the Internet age, all distances have been curtailed. One’s misdemeanours are

no longer circumscribed by the barriers of time and space. Geographical aspect or temporal

obsolescence can no longer preserve a tainted reputation. Everything is here and now and

eternally recoverable in a globally-networked world. This is equally true of an academy

which has had to thrive in this new digital sphere in order to compete with the challenge of

the new pedagogic behemoths of Distance Learning and MOOCs – Massive Open Online

Courses. The Indian and Chinese Wittgenstein Societies rebuffed Denk’s approaches, too.

With diminishing options, Denk was forced to create an academic outlet for his revelation,

and thus the Irish Wittgenstein Society was founded with an Executive Committee of one.

Not that this was known to the public applying for membership. Denk’s subterfuge was

rigorous to the end and his goals cloaked through layers of obfuscation and opaque walls of

administration. The committee members remained anonymous, the registration process

was free, and, such is the draw of the Austrian philosopher, subscriptions duly followed –

enough to provide an audience for his dramatic disclosure.

After The Guardian got wind of it and ran an article, a media scrum followed. Denk was

clearly doing work behind the scenes as the articles contain quotes from the intangible

man: ‘I couldn’t believe my eyes when I first saw the notes’; ‘It provides an almost

wholesale change of aspect for his major works’; ‘The true motivation behind the thinking
is finally visible;’ ‘Here, finally, is the key to unlocking the very heart of Wittgenstein’s

philosophy.’ One cannot but be struck by the similarities with that earlier article in the same

paper reporting Gibson’s find; some of the phraseology is almost like for like. There is the

same wonderment, the same belief in its transformative power over the philosopher’s

oeuvre, and the same belief that the notes allow one to finally peer behind the wizard’s

curtain and see how the magic is done. Other quotes, however, reveal a very different

agenda to Gibson’s: ‘In spite of the vociferous green-eyed doubters, I always believed

Wittgenstein was engaged in a philosophy of detection and I have finally been vindicated’;

‘Yes, the manuscript is in a very secure place’; ‘Of course I would be happy for experts to

examine the find in the right circumstances, but those circumstances have yet to

materialise’; ‘I am extremely keen to publish the notes so that both academics and the

general public can make their own assessment of these astonishing notes’.

This last comment was enough to have even normally reserved academic publishers

scrambling to get hold of Denk’s find, despite its authenticity being uncorroborated via the

customary peer-reviewed processes which were once the foundation of good scholarship.

In this instance, close scrutiny of the notes by a graphologist should be the minimum

requirement. Better still would have been a deeper engagement with the trove through

forensic linguistics. So far as I know, neither was done. The publishers saw a huge hit on

their hands and lay their academic scruples aside. The book came out in the spring and was

an instant hit with the general public. Whilst many academics remained highly sceptical of

the notes (and scathing of its publication), some sought to garner kudos by association and

were quick to add their own puffs to the book jacket: ‘Genuinely thrilling’ (Prof. Jonty
Simenon); ‘In one fell swoop, Denk has recalibrated Wittgenstein scholarship almost in its

entirety’ (Dr. Felicity Gladwell); ‘The academic find of the century’ (AJ Voles).

In the meantime, the website for the Irish Wittgenstein Society had been erased, existing

only as a single cached homepage. Its utility had been expended. Denk had his book deal,

the notoriety he sought and multiple revenue streams. There was even talk of Hollywood

coming calling about an adaptation for the big screen. It was then that Denk slipped out of

view altogether. Rather than savouring these successes, he eschewed the limelight of book

signings and literary festivals. Was he being careful not to overexpose himself, sensitive to

the scrutiny such a spotlight would cast on himself and his methods? Or is he merely biding

his time, sizing up the next philosophical stock to invest his dubious talents in, before he

unveils another literary forgery on an all-too trusting public? It is also possible he has made

enough to retire on and this fraud was a one-time deal. A more morbid suggestion is that

the author, whoever he or she was, has died. Time will play its part in unfolding the truth of

‘his’ disappearance, but I shall not sit idly by in the interim. There is foraging and analysis to

be done in the archive, even if only in the extant publications we have from Denk, and that

is what I have been doing.

Returning to Dear Old Blood, it soon becomes apparent that whole episodes have

been lifted from Ray Monk’s autobiography almost verbatim. Furthermore, there are

elements which Wittgenstein could not have known about. Take the bar scene in which

Russell’s letters to Lady Ottoline Morrell are cited as quasi-descriptors of the philosopher –

‘passionate, dominating, acutely intellectual’, ‘the most perfect example of a genius’, etc.,

etc. Are we to somehow believe Wittgenstein was so acquainted with this description of

himself as to be able to repeat it verbatim? Even if we allow Denk the leniency of suggesting
the Austrian was au fait with Russell’s sentiments towards himself, what is the likelihood of

him striking such exact verisimilitude between fiction and the actual letter of 1912 to

Morrell? The probabilities must be in the region of millions to one!

An online article at the website mysteryfile.net entitled Hard-boiled Wit: Ludwig

Wittgenstein and Norbert Davis by Josef Hoffmann seems to be yet another source

uncredited by Denk. Its discussion of the parallels between detectives and philosophers may

have inspired the academic’s philosophy of detection, although the latter is admittedly more

fully developed in Denk’s endnotes. This article was almost certainly influential in conjuring

up the possibility that the missing notes from Rosro Cottage might contain not further

philosophical enquiry by Wittgenstein but a hardboiled detective story by the philosopher.

Indeed, Denk seems to have been seduced by the very name of Wittgenstein’s late work –

Philosophical Investigations – which is thick with resonances of the mental detective work

that a philosopher engages in.

Wikipedia is a worryingly recurrent point of reference. In the afterword of the second

edition of ‘Dear Old Blood’, an image is retrieved from the notoriously fallible online

encyclopaedia to rebut an accusation I had made regarding the tomb marker used as a

‘dead drop’ in the story. Since the item used on the grave in the story is a pile of pennies

and not the ladder that appears in the photos, Denk believes this works as proof in his

favour with regards to the story and its authorship. I remain unconvinced. The very use of a

horizontal tomb marker and the appearance of objects on it bespeak the influence of the

photo that is being used in his defence, a photo that necessarily existed after Wittgenstein’s

death. Similarly, the Karl Popper poker debacle has clearly been abstracted from a

Wikipedia synopsis of the book written about the incident, Wittgenstein’s Poker. Indeed, so
much has been transposed from the Internet uncredited that one wonders whether

plagiarism is not le mot juste here.

At times, Denk seems to have raided a host of online glossaries of noir slang – heater,

convincer, gunsel. These hardboiled terms are used haphazardly throughout the work, which

could appear to strengthen Denk’s hand in arguing that Wittgenstein, a non-native speaker

who had no pretensions of being a literary figure, wrote the story. And yet all the research

shows Wittgenstein to have been a connoisseur of hardboiled detective fiction and a prolific

reader of Smith & Street. Ergo, he would have had a formidable understanding of the argot

used therein and, given his natural genius, should have had no problem reproducing them in

a fictional form of his own devising. This is manifestly not the case. For instance, there is a

reticence to repeat words already used, so what appears are a slew of synonyms for the

same object: a gun is a ‘heater’, ‘convincer’, ‘iron’, but never these things twice, as though

Nix is incapable of falling back on the same verbal patterns. Again, this very lack of a

discernible idiolect with set phraseology could be argued to support Denk’s claim to Nix

being Wittgenstein’s work. Realism is a hard thing for even seasoned writers to bring off well

and, in any case, hardboiled fiction is not striving for realism per se. So-called ‘pulp fiction’

has always been rough and ready, meant for fast consumption, disposable; they were being

written for the emerging throwaway society of modern consumerism. Theodore Adorno saw

such works as the industrialised product of a cultural industry – they were not meant to be

literary or long-lasting. It was only with the arrival of polished prose writers like Dashiell

Hammett and Raymond Chandler that the noir form acquired a more literary lustre. Yet these

are not the writers Wittgenstein was reading. Street & Smith and his beloved Norbert Davis

espoused the accessible, no frills approach to the genre. But perhaps these very errors are
the work of a hoaxer trying to emulate the inherent poor writing of pulp fiction or of a

non-native speaker attempting to write it. Of course, it could actually be Wittgenstein’s story

– only access to the original manuscript will reveal which it is. In its absence, we are forced to

become detectives ourselves, hunting for clues as to the verity of a fiction we are reading.

Such ironies are the stuff that hoaxes are made of.

Other anomalies include the posh Brit-speak of ‘bally’ (Russell), ending sentences with

‘what’, the use of ‘jolly’, and so forth: all are cliché stereotypes of Cambridge elites. Just as

the noir speak borrows from Chandler et al, so this ‘toff speak’ seems cribbed from a

collected edition of PG Wodehouse. Other lexical aberrations include a few flat notes which

betray the use of contemporary idiom. Russell’s use of the phrase ‘Very Godwit’ sounds

plucked from a modern sitcom; it should be something like “that was Godwit through and

through”. Another example is with the notion of Death ‘outsourcing’ labour to him. The

earliest use of ‘outsource’ as a verb in the OED is 1979. Is this the clearest idea that the

document is later than 1948. Can any explanation for this lexical aberration be found? Is it

the author’s own language game or original usage? Were the source documents to be found

and Wittgenstein proven to be the author, this would show him to have pioneered this

usage? It is exceedingly doubtful that this will be shown to be the case. To reiterate my point,

this slip is either a genuine error made by Denk, or a deliberate one, possibly arising from an

unconscious desire to be caught out by close-reading of his work. Such close-reading

validates the work in the eyes of its creator, regardless of whether the work is eventually

shown to be a hoax through the very close-reading its author craves! It is a paradoxical

double-bind worthy of a philosopher who has forged an entire career out of them: Slavoj

Žižek.
Then there is the appearance of the Tractatus-Philosophicus Logicus, which sees parallels

drawn by Nix between the philosophical work and the art of detection. Knowing Denk’s

earlier paper, the aforementioned ‘Hardboiled Propositions’, the appearance of so similar a

notion in the story should arouse suspicion immediately. Further studies such as corpus text

analysis may show what I believe to be the case, that Denk is using this story to push his own

Wittgensteinian agenda, that of the philosophy of detection and detective fiction as a core

element of the Austrian’s philosophy. I still await the appearance in the relevant journals of

an ‘I told you so’-style paper, which I expect the hoaxer, if he or she is still alive, would be

unable to resist. Above all, it is my belief that they desire to be caught, and so leave a trail of

breadcrumbs to this end. Why? Partly to gain renown through duping the ‘eggheads’ of

academia, I expect, as well as any personal point-scoring vis-à-vis me to be achieved therein;

partly to be admired for his own fictional skills at engineering such a multi-layered deception.

In the Age of Celebrity, Denk had found his means of accessing this garlanded sphere – one

that would guarantee newspaper column notoriety and an income that could potentially last

a lifetime, temptations which clearly proved irresistible.

As I can find no reference to the asylum in issues of Street & Smith Wittgenstein is likely to

have read, I believe Nix’s Pennhurst Asylum reference derives from yet more cursory online

research. The most probable source is one of those sensationalist modern lists that parade

themselves as journalism along the lines of ‘9 Creepiest Insane Asylums’, which have become

the bane of rigorous academic research online. It may also be that Denk had assayed the

market of asylum-inflected horror in contemporary film and video game cultures and was

hoping to obtain benefit therefrom.

The book’s ending returns us to another contemporary cultural trope: the Nazis. I have

previously exposed this plotline in light of Richard Evans’s belief that the modern era is

morbidly obsessed with Nazi history. Viewed thus, this narrative element morphs into a

canny marketing ploy by Denk. Upon further reflection, the story’s ending discloses another

narrative influence, that of George Lucas’s Indiana Jones films. In them, the Nazis become a

synecdoche for Evil in opposition to the heroic moral goodness which Jones represents. One

need only consider the first film Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981), which features a pivotal scene

set in a snow-blasted mountain hut in Nepal that resolves in a shootout with a Nazi and his

hired thugs. The parallels of fire, snow and Nazi gunfire are hard to overlook as possible

inspirations.

Occasionally, Denk raises his head above the parapet to take aim at the latest trends in

modern scholarship, as he does in endnote 19. Here the so-called Speculative Turn receives

an excoriating salvo from Denk’s pen. His plea for quietism results in the author contradicting

himself by excising Wittgenstein quotes (the much-abused Whereof one cannot speak,

thereof one must be silent from the Tractatus) to score scholastic points which only seem to

exist in the author’s mind. The peevish reference in the Afterword regarding the use I have

made of Deleuze and Guatari – perfectly legitimate, I might add – reveals the infantile mode

of argumentation which he is prepared to engage in.

Denk remains elusive, construct-like. There is a risk of slipping into the Continental mode of

thinking, whether it be demurely announcing the ‘Death of the Author’ à la Barthes or

striking Foucauldian ‘author-function’ poses. One shudders. Aren’t such postmodernist

parlour tricks behind us now? Is Denk really whatever we want him to be, an entity who is

continually subjected to the valences of the reader? His name lends itself to such thinking.
Denk derives from the German Denken, to think, whilst herbert is British slang for ‘an

undistinguished or foolish man or youth’. Finding the words conjoined together through

mere parental whim seems too good to be true. To think this is to suppose Denk’s hoax

stretches all the way to his having created himself. Alas, the archive is scant enough to allow

room for such fanciful thought experiments, in spite of my endeavours to plug such gaps. It

would be unprofessional to say that he feels real to me – but I must confess, he does. He is,

after all, an adversary with whom I have been doing intellectual battle for several years now.

He may yet reveal himself alive and well and with the birth name John Smith. Time will

hopefully tell. My concern, however, is not just for an academy still reeling from the Sokal

hoax4. The dangers of exposing frauds are manifold and there is always a risk that the

accuser will become the accused. Alas, this has now happened to me. It transpires that my

own authorial existence is being called into question, and I will give a brief resumé of this sad

affair at the end of this essay.

Replacing my professional cap and the facts of the matter at hand – the things that are the

case, as Wittgenstein might phrase it, the Denk archive contains several papers published

under this name and, more significantly, one book purporting to be the published notes

made in Ludwig Wittgenstein’s hand at Rosro Cottage in the summer of 1948. Those notes

amount to a story – a hardboiled detective story, which have been arranged in the most likely

order by Denk. Rather than condemning it for being a hoax, there is a school of thought that

says perhaps we should celebrate its literary pretensions. There is, after all, a

carefully-crafted noir thriller at the heart of this text, and whilst it may not reach the dizzy

heights of Chandler and Hamnett, its author clearly never meant it to. It was meant to sit

alongside the pulp offerings of Street & Smith – a detective story by a jobbing writer earning

4
See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sokal_affair for a full outline of this troubling affair.
a crust churning out hardboiled fiction for the monthly story magazines. The

self-congratulatory tone in the endnotes is, I believe, further proof of Denk’s authorship of

the work. Phrases such as “his genius is such” and “distinctly satisfying conclusion” show how

he cannot resist drawing attention to his own authorial skill. These irksome asides tend to

mitigate any sympathies I might have had for the aforementioned school of thought willing

to decontextualize the story and judge the text qua text.

Finally we come to the appendix. Like the so-called endnotes, the addition of an appendix is

presumably supposed to add academic heft to the presentation of this find. Whilst these

extracts are described as literary cast-offs, they appear to be failed first drafts which their

true author (Denk) was still loathe to part with. Instead, he has found a way of including

them within the finished book. Isolated in the appendix, though, they expose themselves for

what they are: rudimentary glosses on the Monk biography. Here are moments cherry-picked

from the eccentric philosopher’s life story, with an obvious tendency of placing him in

humdrum suburban environments in a foreign land to further exaggerate his peculiarities.

My commentary is almost complete but there is still one loose end which I must tie up, if

only provisionally. I mentioned earlier that to decry deception is to risk oneself becoming

accused of the same deceit, and this has, alas, been the case with me. It is the fate of

academics to have their work resisted. Each generation is keen to make their mark in an

increasingly crowded field by unearthing some small and overlooked treasure in the archive.

When Denk was unable to find any hard proof for his theory of Wittgenstein’s oeuvre as a

philosophy of detection, he turned to his own fictional talents to conjure up a trove of notes.

I, in my turn, have turned the spotlight on Denk’s literary hoax to draw attention to such

malpractice, which I believe is in part a direct corollary of the increased pressure for
academics to publish in the modern, metrics-driven world. And now the wheel turns full

circle and the spotlight is being shone on me. In recent months it has come to my attention

that a keen young Finnish academic, Sami Salo, has cast doubt on the very existence of

Herbert Denk. In his wildest claim to date, which comes in the form of a long rambling ‘blog

post’, he has suggested that I am the author of multiple hoaxes – Herbert Denk, Dear Old

Blood and my own refutations of Denk’s work! Hoaxing a hoax – it would probably be a

world first if I had the temerity to attempt such a foolhardy feat. Whilst I would ordinarily

ignore such inflammatory Internet-based vanity publishing, the notice which these very

public protestations have garnered means that, to do so in this instance, could prove costly

to a hitherto-unsullied reputation. I will therefore be conducting a point-by-point refutation

in a forthcoming issue of The Wittgensteinian, which will then be included in all future

editions of Dear Old Blood: Further Notes on a Wittgenstein Noir. As I have become the de

facto gatekeeper of Denk’s estate, I feel as duty bound to guard against falsehood in relation

to him as I am to myself.