The folks at Harcourt thought I might like to see the cover they designed for the American edition of Inger Wolfe‘s The Calling, instead of the Canadian version I’d been using before, which is as good an excuse as any to take one last look at the question of who the pseudonymous Wolfe is supposed to be. You might recall that Michael Redhill‘s name was raised yesterday, a possibility that got another vote in my mailbox soon after. “It is Redhill,” said one publishing insider. “When it was first submitted, they weren’t too discreet about it.”

Well, that had an air of definitiveness about it, unlike the Margaret Atwood guess that also came in, so I asked the person at Harcourt who sent me the cover, who certainly wasn’t going to tell me, and then I called Redhill and Wolfe’s agent, Ellen Levine, whose assistant reminded me that I could ask Harcourt any questions I had about Wolfe. “Oh, but this is a question about Michael Redhill,” I said, so her assistant, after consulting offline with Levine, said she could pass that question on. “Has Michael Redhill sold a novel under a pseudonym?” I asked. As of the time this was published, there has been no response, and I told Levine and my contacts at Harcourt I wouldn’t bug them about Wolfe’s identity again, so that’s the end of that, at least on this site.

Too bad, too, because now I don’t get to use the “Who’s Afraid of Inger Wolfe?” headline I came up with on the subway.