There's so much mystery around Charles Portis that we're not even clear whether he’s alive

The American writer, Charles Portis, has had what some novelists — the more purist ones — might regard as an ideal life. While his books have seldom been big-sellers, his fans sink to their knees at the mention of his name.

In the mid 1980s, two bookshop employees in New York were so smitten with Portis’s then out-of-print novel, The Dog of the South, that they bought up all 183 hardback copies on the market and put them in their bookshop window. The books sold out in days. Contacted in his hometown of Little Rock, Arkansas, where he writes in an office behind a bar called Cash McCool’s, Portis said that he was ‘surprised and pleased by the attention’.

Over here, he’s best known for True Grit — but more for the two film adaptations than for the novel itself. He did, however, spend two years as the London bureau chief of the Herald Tribune in the early 1960s when he covered Harold Macmillan’s 70th birthday party and once interviewed a witch who had a jackdaw called Hotfoot Jackson perched on her shoulder.