If all has gone well, here are updated lists of both Mystery and SF paperbacks I have for sale. Warning: These lists are long. The one for mysteries is 90 pages in its WordPerfect format. For anyone reading this, please take a 30% discount in either category.

         Mystery Paperbacks

         SF Paperbacks

WARNING: This is the 12 minute version. Wait until you have time to listen to it from beginning to end.

MAX ALLAN COLLINS – Kill Your Darlings. PI Gat Garson. Walker, hardcover, 1984. Tor, paperback, 1988. Thomas & Mercer, softcover, 2012.

   Max Allan Collins is not merely a writer of mystery novels (and of the Dick Tracy comic strip); he is also a mystery scholar, collector, and fan. This book, third in a series featuring his detective alter ego, Mallory (like Collins, a mystery collector, fan, and writer from a small town in Iowa), is an “inside” story about mystery fans and fandom. It takes place at the Bouchercon, the annual convention for mystery fans and writers. (By a remarkable coincidence, Collins sets the story al the same Chicago hotel where the 1984 convention was actually held.)

   The murder victim is Roscoe Kane, a veteran paperback mystery writer, His once-popular detective, Gat Garson, is out of fashion, and Kane is on the skids. He’s at the con to receive an award from the Private Eye Writers Association, but drowns in the bathtub – an apparent accident – before the presentation. Mallory, Kane’s friend and fan, isn’t satisfied by the medical examiner’s hasty verdict and noses around, suspecting that Kane’s death might be linked to the upcoming publication of a “lost” Hammett Continental Op story.

   In an introduction, Collins makes the disclaimer that his fictional Bouchercon attendees, writers and fans, are mostly composites of real characters. However, initiates will have little trouble identifying many of them, including a self-absorbed guest of honor named Keats – the creator of a sensitive-macho private-eye character. Other inside jokes and fan tributes are scattered throughout; e.g., Collins’s borrowing of a gaudy metaphor from Spillane’s Vengeance Is Mine in the climactic shooting scene.

   This fast-moving and inventive novel is the newest addition to the very small subgenre of fandom mystery novels. Two others are Bill Pronzini’s Hoodwink (murder at a pulp collector’s convention) and Edward D. Roch’s Shattered Raven (murder at the MWA Awards Banquet).

   Mallory is also featured in The Baby Blue Rip-Off (1983), No Cure for Death (1984), and A Shroud for Aquarius (1985).

     ———
   Reprinted with permission from 1001 Midnights, edited by Bill Pronzini & Marcia Muller and published by The Battered Silicon Dispatch Box, 2007.   Copyright © 1986, 2007 by the Pronzini-Muller Family Trust.

Bibliographic Update: Add to the books in the Mallory series: Nice Weekend for a Murder (1986).

CONSTANCE CORNISH – Dead of Winter. Simon & Schuster, hardcover, 1959. Detective Book Club, hardcover, 3-in-1 edition. No US paperback edition.

   After the death of her husband Paul, Abbey Humphrey had decided to leave Manhattan and the big city life for the slower pace of a small town in Vermont, but when she discovers the body of the husband of Jenny, a good friend and neighbor, in her home when she returns from a weekend trip to New York City, she also learns that maybe she hadn’t been fitting in as well as she thought she had.

   There are secrets, she finds out, beneath the surface, no matter where you are, and in a small New England town, more people know them – or rumors about them – than maybe is true in a big city. Gossip and friends who are nosier than you think they were, and suspicions, abound.

   The story takes place just before Christmas, but the chill comes more from not knowing who’s responsible for trying to pin the murder on her, and less from the chill in the air. The police are of little help. They seem to suspect everyone, but Abbey perhaps even more than the others.

   What this one-shot novel, by an author I have found very little about, really is is a detective story with some bite. There are plenty of clues and alibis to be checked out, both solid pluses as far as I’m concerned. There’s no way a series could be made of this one, but I would have thought Constance Cornish might have written another one, but she didn’t. Based on this one single example, I think she should have.

   The photo of her there to the left comes from the jacket’s back cover. It also states that Constance Cornish was an actress on Broadway, and that she also acted – and wrote – for radio. Googling for more information didn’t turn up anything for me. You may have better luck. The jacket also says she was married to George A. Cornish, Executive Editor of the New York Herald-Tribune. An online obituary for the latter confirms that he was survived by his wife, the former Constance Brown.

Note: Another online review of Dead of Winter can be found here:

LEE CHILD – Die Trying. Jack Reacher #2. Putnam, hardcover, 1998. Jove, paperback, 1999. Setting: Montana.

   Jack Reacher, former MP and expert sharpshooter, just tries to be a nice guy to a woman having trouble folding her dry cleaning. In exchange, they both end up being kidnapped and taken to a paramilitary camp in Montana. The woman isn’t just anyone; Holly Johnson is an FBI agent with a very powerful father and godfather. The militarists don’t want money, they want to start their own

   Strong characters, excellent dialogue and non-stop, albeit very violent, action combine to make this a fast, entertaining read. I’d categorize this as a perfect airplane book — a great book in which to escape for a few hours, but not one you’re likely to collect or reread.

Rating: Very Good.

   More than half a century ago a young man happened to notice a curious fact about two English detective novelists of the Golden Age and ran with it. The authors were John Rhode and Miles Burton and the young man was me. The curious fact was that, whenever anyone in a book by either writer was asked a question, we were always told that he or she “replied.” Both authors were prolific, and that simple word must have appeared in their complete works thousands of times. It was clear, to me at any rate, that the same man was behind both bylines.

   Today the identity of Rhode and Burton, whose real name was Cecil J. C. Street (1884-1965), is acknowledged in a host of reference books and on countless websites. Over the generations since I caught on to the fact, I’ve read a fair amount of Rhode, who was quite well known in the U.S., but precious little of Burton, who wasn’t. Late last year I decided it was time to revisit Burton and soon concluded that his personal golden age, like Rhode’s, was the 1930s. Shall we check him out?

   THE MILK-CHURN MURDER (1935; U.S. title THE CLUE OF THE SILVER BRUSH, 1936) was the twelfth novel under the Burton byline, the fourth to appear over here, and the first to be published by Doubleday Crime Club, which remained his American publisher as long as he had one. Just as all but a handful of the Rhode books feature that scientific curmudgeon Dr. Priestley, the protagonists of the vast majority of Burtons are wealthy amateur of crime Desmond Merrion and his Scotland Yard buddy Inspector Arnold.

   Merrion’s forte, unlike Priestley’s, is the spinning of elaborate theories of the crime he’s investigating based on a tiny number of evidentiary hints, and he spins like a manic spider in MILK-CHURN. We open with a vivid portrayal of dairy farming in the rural west of England and soon segue into the discovery of a headless and dismembered body inside a huge milk can. (The original title leads me to suspect that in the English edition the can was called a churn, a word that never appears in the American text, which was apparently altered in other ways too, for example the conversion of distances from meters to miles.)

   The can also contains several other objects — a worn leather wallet stamped with the initials ALS, the frame of a pair of lens-less spectacles bearing the same initials, a hotel-room key, a railway timetable — and, in one of his imaginative leaps, Merrion concludes that some of the clues were meant to mislead the police and others to help them find the murderer. In due course there’s a second gruesome death, the victim being a woman who was stripped naked and thrust face first into the fireplace in Merrion’s flat, and then a third, the apparent suicide-by-hanging of the murderer.

   In the final chapters comes something we almost never find in Rhode or Burton, an all-out action sequence. As Merrion and Arnold chase their quarry across a pitch-dark railway shunting yard filled with moving freight train cars, we might almost believe we’ve stumbled into a cop movie of fifty or sixty years later, perhaps starring Clint Eastwood.

   THE PLATINUM CAT (1938) takes place at a time when the threat of a second World War hung heavily over the British Isles. A fire breaks out at 3:00 A.M., destroying an abandoned farm cottage in the Weald of Kent, and beneath the debris is discovered a man’s body, burned beyond recognition. The initials on a pair of cuff links strongly suggest that the dead man was an official of the Ministry of Defence, one of the three men with access to the secret plans to be activated in case of an air raid on London.

   But what was he doing in the Kentish countryside in the middle of the night, and why was he carrying the titular cat figure which was found on his body? Was he about to sell those secret plans to a foreign agent, or was he murdered by a jealous rival for the woman in his life? And what accounts for the allusions to Norse mythology with which the clues are studded?

   As in THE MILK-CHURN MURDER there’s plenty of speculative theorizing between Merrion and Arnold, with Merrion again displaying his knack for coming up with wildly imaginative theories based on a few shreds of evidence. This time however he fails to discover the truth, although a sort of justice is done and England’s secrets are preserved. One of the book’s unusual aspects is the identity of the adversary country.

   In a novel set in 1937, when war with Hitler’s Third Reich was widely believed to be inevitable — as witness, for example, William L. Shirer’s BERLIN DIARY (1941) and the final chapters of the first volume of Norman Sherry’s GRAHAM GREENE: A BIOGRAPHY (1989) — Hitler is never mentioned and the perpetrator of the espionage against England is, as you might have guessed, the Soviet Union. I can’t resist indulging in a Merrionesque speculation: might Rhode/Burton’s books have been published in Germany but not in the U.S.S.R.?

   The next Burton on my shelves dates from the thick of the war and is more interesting as a picture of an English small town in wartime than as a detective novel. In MURDER, M. D. (1943; U.S. title WHO KILLED THE DOCTOR?) nothing much happens for quite a while beyond the introduction of various village characters. The local doctor has joined the military and his replacement or locum (which comes from the Latin locum tenens) is a native Austrian who is more competent professionally than his predecessor but has a talent for antagonizing everyone he meets and is widely suspected of being a spy.

   In Chapter 3 this intruder into village life is found dead at the gravel-covered bottom of a small quarry with the back of his head bashed in. Everyone treats the death as an accidental fall while the doctor was out birdwatching; everyone, that is, but the local squire, Sir Mark Corringham, who asks visiting Captain Merrion to look into the matter. A few subtle clues convince Merrion that the doctor was murdered but he doesn’t share his conclusions with the authorities and nothing else happens until the arrival of the locum’s replacement, who turns out to be an attractive woman.

   This lady takes over the practice and charms the community but is herself murdered by head-bashing after a few months, and Scotland Yard is summoned in the person of Merrion’s old compadre Inspector Arnold. Eventually Merrion has an inspiration and sets a trap.

   The detection, when it finally comes, is reasonably interesting — although a map of the area and a timetable of everyone’s movements would have been helpful — but many modern readers might be more fascinated by the details of wartime existence: the blackouts, the rationing points, the hearing before what we would call a municipal court where Sir Mark in his capacity as justice of the peace fines a grocer five guineas and costs for “selling a vegetable-marrow at a penny above the controlled price,” the need for locals to go out into the woods and shoot pheasants, quail and rabbits if they want dinner.

   During the war years the mystery critic for the San Francisco Chronicle was Anthony Boucher, who usually had a kind word for the John Rhode novels that crossed his desk but reserved some of his snarkiest remarks for Burton, unaware that the two authors were one. On THIS UNDESIRABLE RESIDENCE (1942; U.S. title DEATH AT ASH HOUSE) he said: “Inspector Arnold plods through the problem of the bashed secretary and at last catches up with the reader. Relentlessly painstaking — -and giving.” MURDER, M. D./WHO KILLED THE DOCTOR? he dismissed as infuriatingly snobbish and “[a]mmunition for Anglophobes.”

   In his review of FOUR-PLY YARN (1944; U.S. title THE SHADOW ON THE CLIFF) he described Merrion’s specialty as “clearing the aristocracy and proving that crime is a property of commoners.” Of NOT A LEG TO STAND ON (1945) he conceded that the “[s]omewhat ingenious puzzle lifts this above the dismal run of Burton novels.” Least of all did he like EARLY MORNING MURDER (1945; U.S. title ACCIDENTS DO HAPPEN, 1946), which he called “dull, endless and snobbish” and featuring “the most incompetent detection…of the past decade….”

   The last four Burtons published in this country came out in the interim between Boucher’s departure from the Chronicle and the beginning of his legendary tenure as mystery critic of the New York Times. His comments leave me with little interest in exploring any of these books. If you’re determined to read Burton, my advice is to stick to his novels of the Thirties. If you can find any.

RICHARD POWELL – Say It with Bullets. Simon & Schuster, hardcover, 1953. Graphic #93, paperback, 1954; Hard Case Crime, paperback, 2006.

   Imagine my astonishment when I read this book and found nothing inside it that even vaguely alluded to the image on the cover of the Graphic edition. No wonder my generation grew up mistrustful of authority.

   What I did find was a well-crafted road mystery, in retrospect full of improbabilities, but so well papered-over I didn’t notice.

   Powell starts things off with ex-cargo pilot Bill Wayne on a bus, heading West on a guided tour that stops at Cheyenne, Reno, San Francisco and LA. It seems he has an old wound in his back from when he and five war buddies in China fell out over what sort of cargo they should be piloting, and one of them settled it with a .45. He has a new wound in his side from when word got out that he was back in the states, and now he wants to find out which one of his old buddies decided that was much too close for comfort.

   Okay, improbability #1: He found a tour that stops at the cities where his ex-partners live, and he figures this is the best way to get close to them without leaving a trail. Which leads to

   Improbability #2: The tour is guided by the girl who had a crush on him, back when he was a football star in college, and she was just the coach’s gangly daughter.

   But like I say, Powell rolls over these so smoothly I didn’t even feel the bumps, and before I could stop and think it over, Bill was meeting up with the first old buddy on his list — who turns up dead shortly thereafter.

   At this point Powell rings in a horn-dog deputy, supposedly out to solve the murder, but apparently more interested in romancing the woman in the case. Or is he?

   Powell keeps us guessing, even as he rings in complications that somehow don’t slow things down. We get fights, foot-chases, frame-ups, narrow escapes, and enough bullets flying through the air to satisfy even the most discriminating tastes.

   And one thing I especially enjoyed. There’s a hefty chunk of this book spent driving into Yosemite National Park through the back entrance, over the Tioga pass. Anyone who has ever driven this road will never forget it. I’ve done it, and it was like hanging onto a Brahma Bull. Powell does it justice and even throws in a gunfight on the way.

   You just can’t beat writing like that!

NOOSE FOR A LADY. 1953. Dennis Price as Simon Gale, Rona Anderson, Ronald Howard, Pamela Alan, Melissa Stribling. Based on the novel Whispering Woman by Gerald Verner (Wright & Brown, 1949; apparently rewritten as Noose for a Lady, Wright & Brown, 1952, based on a BBC radio dramatization of the prior novel and with Simon Gale as the new leading character). Director: Wolf Rilla. Available for viewing online here.

   A short but very effective detective mystery, that in only an hour’s running time you can pack in a lot of clues, questioning and theorizing, just like mystery novels do, and not have it bore the audience to fits of yawning and drifting off to sleep. That there a built-in urgency to the investigation on the part of Simon Gale (Dennis Price) as the amateur detective in charge doesn’t hurt at all, either.

   It seems that his cousin is in jail awaiting her hanging, having been convicted of poisoning her husband, and there is only a week to go before it happens. Working closely with her stepdaughter, Gale’s primary suspects are the small group of “friends” the dead man had. I place friends in quotes, for as his investigation goes on, they discover that each of them has secrets that the dead man had found out about and was holding the facts over their heads.

   Not for blackmail per se. He was a cruel-hearted man who merely enjoyed tormenting his victims, simply for the pleasure of it. One of them must have killed him, but who? The movie ends with one those “gather all the suspects together” scenes which have been become such cliches in old-fashioned mystery novels, but if the books can do it, why can’t the movies? And TV, of course, later on (Murder, She Wrote).

   The characterization are simply sketched in but are quite excellent portrayed, thanks to good acting, the photography very fluid and smooth, and the solution? I suppose it’s safe to say that if I figured it out, you very well may, too, but I still thought it was quite good.

TONY ROME. 20th Century Fox, 1967. Frank Sinatra, Jill St. John, Richard Conte, Sue Lyon, Gena Rowlands, Simon Oakland, Jeffrey Lynn, Lloyd Bochner, Rocky Graziano, Shecky Greene. Title song: “Tony Rome,” written by Lee Hazelwood, performed by Nancy Sinatra. Screenplay by Richard Breen, based on the novel Miami Mayhem by Anthony Rome (Marvin H. Albert). Directed by Gordon Douglas.

   Cop-turned-private detective Tony Rome (Frank Sinatra) lives on a powerboat in Miami. In a captain’s hat and a yellow turtle-neck, he is enjoying the sunshine when he gets a call from Ralph Turpin. The pair were partners in the police but now hate each other. Now a “hotel dick,” Turpin has discovered a young, drunk woman lying unconscious in one of the rooms. He and the manager want her out before the police start bothering them and are ready to pay Rome for the service.

   Diana Pines, it turns out, is not just anyone, but the daughter of millionaire construction magnate Rudy Kosterman and her father is grateful when Rome brings her home. She has been acting strangely lately and he wants Rome to find out why. Meanwhile, Diana discovers her diamond pin has gone missing, believes it must have been stolen while she was drunk and wants it back. Now hired by the whole family, Rome investigates and soon finds the first of several dead bodies…

   One of the interesting things about the 1960s is seeing how the more established stars handled it. Pretty much all of culture changed and many had to adapt. In the wake of The Beatles, Sinatra was not considered cool anymore and his film career faltered. He had always been the most credible of singers-actors, but Marriage on the Rocks (1965) and Assault on a Queen (1966) both failed at the box office while The Naked Runner (1967) received poor notices. In response, Sinatra turned to the kind of part which would fill out his remaining filmography.

   Around this time, the film noir genre was making a minor resurgence, with Bulitt, Harper, P.J., Madigan and Marlowe. These films tried to recapture the grim and darkly glamourous world of The Big Sleep (1946) and Out of the Past (1947), which themselves were trying to evoke the hardboiled setting of the novels they were often adapting.

   Sinatra was one of the first to get on board with this. Based   on Miami Mayhem, a now-forgotten paperback original by writer Marvin H. Albert, Tony Rome cast him as a private detective in the wise-cracking Phillip Marlowe mold, a jaded yet honourable man in a disreputable business.

   It’s not surprising that he fits the part. Many of Sinatra’s best songs  –  “One for My Baby,” “In the Wee Small Hours of the Morning” – conjure the kind of bars in which you would expect to find Sam Spade and Mike Hammer, while his trademark trilby made him look like them.

   The film itself is colourful, both aesthetically and otherwise. The Floridian setting gives it a look which is quite at odds with the shadows and neon found elsewhere in the genre (though both the Travis McGee and Mike Shayne books were based around detectives in the Sunshine State).

   The deliberate way in which director Gordon Douglas focuses on young, bikini-clad women make it seem as though the Bond films were an equal inspiration. Nancy Sinatra – who sang the theme to You Only Live Twice the same year – performs the obligatory cheesy theme here while Diamonds Are Forever’s Jill St. John is Ann Archer, a three-time-divorcee whose main problem is being bored between parties.

   Indeed, there is a seediness which is never less than overt as Rome meets junkies, prostitutes, strippers, blackmailers, gangsters and, of course, a murderer. It is balanced, however, with the usual sardonic humour which, in fairness, is genuinely amusing. There are many great lines here (“You’re not a family, you’re a bunch of people who live at the same address!”).

   The juxtaposition between the grim underworld and the sunny scenes of cheery impudence can be a little jarring, however, most notably in a running gag involving a honeymooning couple.

   The plot is convoluted in the way that is expected from all private eye movies. Like most, it begins with a routine job that quickly gets more complex – something of which even Rome is aware. He is independently hired by each of the Kostermans and finds enough skeletons to fill a cemetery.

   In-between times, he gets into the usual fights and chases, though they are more frequent in the first hour than the second, which drags noticeably. The film could certainly have been cut by as much as half an hour, such is the languid pace and extraneous shots of the scenery, which doesn’t always involve the weather.

   As is the way with these things, the script has more names than a phone book and it is not always easy to match them. The motive, however, is an excellent one and clears up a story that, by the end, gets muddier by the moment.

   An entertaining time-waster, Tony Rome makes up for its inconsistent tone and puzzling plot with Sinatra’s familiar, nonchalant charm and an unapologetic persistence in reminding you of the year it was made. A moderate hit at the box office, a sequel Lady in Cement) and Sinatra’s only, followed a year later.

(MARIE-FRANÇOIS) GORON &ÉMILE GAUTIER – Spawn of the Penitentiary, aka Fleur de Bagne. Black Coat Press (French Mystery Book 4). Paperback / Kindle edition, 2013. First published as a serial (feuilleton) in the Parisian newspaper Le Journal, 1901. Adapted and with an introduction by Brian Stableford.

   The feuilleton, or newspaper serial, remained the dominant form of French popular literature from the heyday of Alexandre Dumas peré well into the early 20th Century, and continued into WW II and beyond in some cases. Some of the great works of French literature were written for this format, Hugo’s Les Miserables, Dumas’ The Three Musketeers and The Count of Monte Cristo, and Eugene Sue’s Mysteries of Paris (one of the most influential novels ever written imitated all over Europe), but by far most such serial fiction was consumed and forgotten however influential.

   Paul Feval with his Jean Diable and Les Habits Noir pioneered the crime novel (his Gregory Temple the first Scotland Yard detective in popular fiction); nobleman turned pulpster Ponson du Terraill crated the rogue turned hero Rocambole whose very name came to represent a kind of popular tale. Rocambolesque; Jean de la Hire’s Nyctalope is literature’s first true superhero; and of course there were the adventures of Maurice Leblanc’s Arsene Lupin and Gaston Leroux’s (Phantom of the Opera) various heroes. D’Artagnan, Lagrdarie (Le Bossu), Cyrano, Jean Valjean, Quasimodo, Edmund Dantes, Eric the Phantom, and Prince Rodolphe are merely a few of the characters to wander through these fictions.

   Spawn of the Penitentiary is in many ways a typical such adventure, a complex series of chases, twists, victories, defeats, and adventures, not always developed fully as writers changed plots and dropped sub plots and characters as readers reacted to weekly installments. Imagine Star Wars if George Lucas instead of planning it out in advance had plotted it on the run filming each weeks installment based on his fan bases likes and dislikes.

   So while there is much to admire about Spawn of the Penitentiary it is in many ways the most basic kind of pulp fiction with barely drawn characters and frequent false trails that lead the reader nowhere, something acknowledged by translator and adapter, SF and Horror novelist and anthologist Brian Stableford (I say adaptation because Stableford has not just translated this and other books in Black Coat Press series, but edited and adapted them to better entertain modern audiences where possible, trying to at least make names uniform throughout a series).

   The plot here involves master criminal Gaston Rouzen whose plans will ultimately pit him against both Monsieur Caredac of the Sûreté, but also against a group of anarchists Rouzen attempts to use for his own purposes and betrays to his own needs.

   Frankly whenever Rouzen’s plans are revealed they prove to be pretty lame usually, he’s a prototype of the super criminal and he’s no Dr. Fu Manchu, Carl Peterson, or Dr. Nikola. Moriarity would probably drown him. As super villains go he sometimes resembles Boris and Natasha from Rocky and Bullwinkle more than Ernst Stavro Blofied.

   Far more interesting than its villain is the book’s attempt to show the impact on both criminal and police of the burgeoning technology of the early 20th Century. Even that is primitive, but it is there.

   But to be brutally honest for anyone not interested in the history of the crime novel or in French serial fiction the most fascinating part of this book are its authors.

   For reasons that will become obvious shortly, I will deal with Emile Gautier first.

   Emile Gautier was a lawyer, but he was also an Anarchist. Before you imagine a man in a black cloak and slouch hat running around with a lighted bomb or a hairy faced radical I should point out that Anarchy was an actual political movement in late 19th and early 20th Century Europe and not merely conspirators meeting and plotting in cellars.

   Gautier was one of its brightest lights, but as you might expect, his politics made him unpopular with the French government. He was arrested, tried, and sentenced to ten years hard labor on Devil’s Island.

   He would have served those ten years in that hellish prison if not for an older friend from his childhood, his future writing partner Marie-François Goron, and Goron was in good position to help him receive a pardon.

   Marie-François Goron was head of the Sûreté from 1887-94, one of the most famous heads of that body in its history, perhaps only behind its first leader, Eugene Vidoq. The Anarchist and convicted felon (political or not) teamed with the Policeman, and not just any policeman, has to be one of the oddest writing teams of all time.

   The Black Coat Press edition has a lovely cover and a fine introduction by Brian Stableford (I will admit to some prejudice as they are my publisher and Jean-Marc Lofficier its publisher my editor and a friend). It is not for everyone, but lovers of pulp fiction, historians of the crime novel, and for anyone interested in the course of popular literature around the world it is a fascinating read.

   Today when most popular literature is celebrated, written about, and collected by devoted fan bases it is fascinating to see how disposable our past entertainment once was, swashbucklers, heroes, tragedy, soap opera, fantastic journeys, dreams and nightmares on faded newsprint, a thrill or a tear a week, imagination and wonder for pennies.

   The uncommon art of the common man.