Must of

I’ve written about the apparently inexplicable use of homophonic spellings with this construction in dialogue in M. John Harrison and Cormac McCarthy before. Here’s another example from Wallace’s Brief Interviews: “The bastard even must of faked that call” (26).

I’m surprised that Wallace, of all the writers I’ve seen this in, didn’t think about this. Perhaps if he did, he had more a direct free indirect style justification for it.