Books: Trespassers Will Be Prosecuted IN SEARCH OF J.D. SALINGER

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Hamilton provides no startling news about his reclusive quarry. Rumors emerge that Salinger has two finished manuscripts locked away, but there is no information about their contents. Instead Hamilton weaves colorful details into what was previously a ragged chronology about Salinger, the misfit son of a Scottish mother and a Jewish father who imported hams and cheeses from Europe. The Salingers were well off, and Sonny, as Jerome David was sometimes called, had New York City as his playground. There were the underachieving school years at Valley Forge Military Academy (the Pencey Prep of Catcher), the brief attendance at New York University and Ursinus College, and enrollment in Burnett's short-story course at Columbia, where Hamilton assembles a sketch of an "on-the-make young college drop-out plotting his first literary career moves."

As a member of a U.S. Army counterintelligence unit during World War II, Salinger searched for Nazis in newly liberated towns and wrote stories while huddled in foxholes. In Paris he met Ernest Hemingway, who supposedly made a bad impression by shooting the head off a chicken. A postwar Salinger cut a tall, dark and disconcerting figure in New York. An editor's wife recalls meeting "Jerry" at a party in 1952: "He came over to me and said that we ought to run away together. I said, 'But I'm pregnant.' And he said, 'That doesn't matter. We can still run away.' "

Among Hamilton's literary anecdotes is the story of the publishing house that missed landing The Catcher in the Rye when a vice president sent the manuscript to the textbook department because he had heard the story was about a preppie.

Hamilton's search for Salinger leads him into the author's fiction, where he finds autobiographical inspiration. The city and suburban settings of Nine Stories reflect Salinger's Manhattan youth and his adult stint among the commuters of Westport, Conn. The soldier in the magical For Esme -- with Love and Squalor suffers from a case of nerves not unlike the symptoms Salinger described in a letter to Hemingway. Models are identified for members of the Glass family, the precocious and haunting characters who ride the time loops of stories as early as A Perfect Day for Bananafish and as late as Seymour: An $ Introduction. The year the fiction stopped, 1965, is the point at which Hamilton ends his account.

Salinger has won his legal battle but with predictable results: he has lost the war against unwanted attention. He was forced to communicate with a world he had long since renounced. He was summoned to Manhattan to give a deposition to the defense. His tone in that document is terse and grudging:

Q. Have you written any full-length works of fiction during the past 20 years which have not been published?

A. Could you frame that a different way? What do you mean by a full-length work? You mean ready for publication?

Q. As opposed to a short story or a fictional piece or a magazine submission.

A. It's very difficult to answer. I don't write that way. I just start writing fiction and see what happens to it.

Q. Maybe an easier way to approach this is, would you tell me what your literary efforts have been in the field of fiction within the last 20 years?

A. Could I tell you or would I tell you?