Harper Lee’s Lawyer Might Have Found Third Mockingbird Novel

Go Set a Watchman has yet to commence its inevitable mass exodus from bookstore shelves, but the much-hyped To Kill A Mockingbird sequel is already in danger of being eclipsed by yet another long lost Lee manuscript.

Yesterday, the Wall Street Journal published a piece by Harper Lee’s lawyer Tonja Carter, in which she reveals that the manuscript for Watchman sits in a safety deposit box “underneath a stack of a significant number of pages of another typed text.”

Carter claims not to have perused these pages, but speculates that they might contain yet another tract on the life of Jean-Louise Finch. “Was it an earlier draft of ‘Watchman’, or of ‘Mockingbird’, or even, as early correspondence indicates it might be, a third book bridging the two? I don’t know.”

According to Carter, we might have an answer soon, once experts — given Lee’s blessing — “examine and authenticate” all of the documents in the safety deposit box.

An exciting prospect for TKAM fans who, this time tomorrow, will have finished tearing their way through Watchman. But given the ambivalence that has characterized most reviews of the book (a “lumpy tale,” says Michiko Kakutani), perhaps it’d be best if the documents turn out to be something less incendiary — like a list of Illuminati members, or a treasure map for the Holy Grail.

(h/t The Guardian)