I’m guessing that once the story of his death, life, and work has been covered from every conceivable angle (now that people are free to cover it without getting a cane to the noggin), and exploited for trite filler, we’ll start getting regularly spaced speculations on what’s in his drawer of unpublished work, as well as cranky legacy protection diatribes.

But what was he doing? The writers of memoirs about him penetrated his legendary secrecy, and occasionally there was some suggestion that “not publishing” did not mean “not writing”. Joyce Maynard, a lover of his from the early Seventies, said in a memoir that he continued to write every morning – something that other intimates confirmed. By 1972, she said, he had finished two more novels. His daughter, Margaret, in another memoir, even described the filing system he had for his unfinished work. A neighbour, Jerry Burt, claimed that Salinger had told him that he had the barely credible total of “15 or 16″ unfinished novels in his famous safe.

Of course, a writer who works in so unusual a way is perfectly likely to have destroyed every one of the books. Or he may not. Speculation about Salinger’s unpublished work has, until this point, been an easy, vulgar sort of critical wondering, like guessing what Keats’s poetry of the 1860s would have been like, or Keith Douglas’s late period.

We’ll never know, so it doesn’t really matter what we say. But we may, in due course, find out what Salinger’s post-publication period was like. Was the weird and unreadable fantasy monologue of “Hapworth 16, 1924″ a one-off blip before he returned to the classical, heartbreaking lucidities of “Raise High the Roof-Beam, Carpenters”? Could there be a novel of the quality of The Catcher in The Rye waiting there?