This piece is the first in a three-part series we’ll be publishing this week on Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird, and Lee’s new novel, Go Set a Watchman.

When it was announced in February that a “new” Harper Lee novel had been “discovered,” there followed the expected gale of media giddiness, the widespread convulsions of joy, a gyrating and ejaculating all across the Web. Pulling up alongside the jubilant ones were the judicious ones, those who questioned how the publication of Lee’s new-old novel, Go Set a Watchman, came to pass: how the publicity-shyest author on earth, she who vowed never to publish another novel after her spirit was jolted by the galactic success of her debut, she who fled Manhattan for the asylum of her hometown of Monroeville, Alabama, how this monastically private writer agreed—in her 89th year, post-stroke, confined to an assisted-living establishment—to bless the reading world with what was the first, failed draft of To Kill a Mockingbird. During the initial sortie of coverage in February, a Newsweek headline bellowed “Friends Say Harper Lee Was Manipulated,” but you didn’t need that deflating headline or any other because you already had those unignorable inner murmurs—they were your conscience saying that something is rotten in Monroeville.

On February 3, HarperCollins posted a press release that relayed how Ms. Lee’s lawyer, Tonja Carter, had recently “discovered the manuscript in a secure place where Ms. Lee keeps her archives.” There’s also a statement attributed to Ms. Lee that reads, in part: “I hadn’t realized it had survived, so was surprised and delighted when my dear friend and lawyer Tonja Carter discovered it. After much thought and hesitation I shared it with a handful of people I trust and was pleased to hear that they considered it worthy of publication. I am humbled and amazed that this will now be published after all these years.”

Those crafty touches—“much thought and hesitation,” “my dear friend,” “people I trust”—are trying a tad too hard, wouldn’t you say? The spotlight-shunning Lee is “amazed” that she will once again be subjected to a freshet of attention, the very soaking she’d organized her life to avoid. The only thing amazing here is the expectation that literate people would be hoodwinked by attributed language that bears hallmarks of subterfuge. Another statement released by Carter in February has Ms. Lee saying: “I’m alive and kicking and happy as hell with the reactions to Watchman”—and this from an author who was known to turn her back should you be unheeding enough to mention To Kill a Mockingbird in her presence, who at a soiree would rather sit on the rear porch and speak to a child than endure your effusions about her novel (see Charles Shields’s superb biography Mockingbird: A Portrait of Harper Lee).

In HarperCollins’s press release, Michael Morrison, whose title is the dizzying caravan President and Publisher of HarperCollins US General Books Group and Canada, believes, in lines that manage to be both tautological and cliché-sodden, that Watchman is “a brilliant book” and a “masterpiece” that “will be revered for generations to come.” Jonathan Burnham, Senior Vice President and Publisher of Harper, an imprint of HarperCollins, believes that Watchman “is a remarkable literary event,” although he obviously means publishing event: big difference. In early June, Robert Thomson, chief executive of News Corp, the parent company of HarperCollins, dubbed Watchman a “fascinating, captivating, important book”—I bet he did—and then added: “It’s the most pre-ordered book in HarperCollins history,” a non sequitur to anyone but a CEO of a global corporation. Listening to businessmen hold forth about literature constitutes a rare kind of comedy.