Was amazed to see your review of the Valery Shore paperback, Final Payment.
Reason: I’d begun to suspect the book didn’t exist, despite the listing in Hubin, because it has been on my paperback want list for maybe a dozen years and yours is the first copy I’ve ever seen. So happens I collect Major Books — in general, they were the Phoenix Press of 70s paperbacks, more than 50% qualifying as “alternative classics” — and Final Payment is one of only two MB mysteries that I don’t have. And judging by your review, it’s one of the few good ones MB published.

   Also noted your piece on Michael Knerr. I don’t have Travis, the book you reviewed, but do have and have read the Monarch, The Violent Lady. Pretty good adventure/mystery tale set mainly on a 49-foot yawl on a long Caribbean treasure cruise.

>> I almost hated to tell Bill that I paid either a dollar for the copy of Final Payment that I found, plus shipping — or was it a pound, since I bought it on eBay from a seller in England — but sometimes collectors tell each other stories like that. As I did so, I asked him about his overall interests in Major Books, and I guess he’s still talking to me, since he replied:

   I’m interested only in their fiction titles (excluding the pure romances). The other mystery I’m missing besides the Shore is The Breaking Point, by Keith Spore. I have all the MB Westerns, or at least all the ones I know about, and nearly all the Gothics and straight fiction titles.

>> Just in case you were wondering: I collect the Gothics and westerns from Major Books too. That makes at least three of us, since my good friend Dan Roberts collects everything that Major Books published, the straight romances and the non-fiction as well. (To the people we meet in the ordinary world, the three of us look as normal as anyone else.)