Faber & Faber

Moving swiftly in the wake of the great recluse's death, Faber has announced a reissue of Ian Hamilton's In Search of Salinger to be published on its Faber Finds list on 15 April. Published in 1988, this was intended as the first serious part-biography of Salinger, whom Hamilton -  a British poet and all-round man of letters who died in 2001 - had admired since discovering The Catcher in the Rye at the age of 17.

Rebuffed by his subject, as he expected, Hamilton nonetheless imposed rules on himself, such as not pursuing his researches beyond 1965, when Salinger removed himself from the public domain. This failed to appease Salinger, who took legal action after seeing the bound galleys, which quoted unpublished letters. The case went to the US Supreme Court and Salinger won.

All this might have been expected to leave what Hamilton called 'the "legal" version of my book' somewhat hobbled. In the event, though, it added extra layers of interest to the rewrite that was finally published. In addition to being a shrewd and enjoyable biographical study of the writer's pre-recluse life, it dramatises the ethical and practical problems raised by biographical research in funny yet darkly thought-provoking ways. Having set out to write a light-hearted stylish, Quest for Corvo-type book, Hamilton ended up with something closer in spirit to Janet Malcolm's The Journalist and the Murderer - 'as devious, as compelling, and in a covert way as violent, as a story by Chandler', a reviewer said at the time. Even if you aren't greatly interested in Salinger, it's well worth checking out.