My thought is that everything online is only temporary.

   That particular concept was thoroughly tested yesterday. You may not have noticed, but this blog was all but offline for 24 hours beginning Thursday night. Nothing disappeared, thank goodness, but I couldn’t access any of the management tools for the blog, including editing and posting. No one could leave comments, either. (If you tried and failed, please try again.)

   I can’t explain things I don’t really understand myself, so I won’t go into details, but my son-in-law Mark says it was a “database server error.”

   While working our way through that, Mark discovered that there is a new hosting plan scheduled to take effect on March 28, after which certain incompatibilities (which I won’t even try to get into) will mean that all 13 plus years of blogging here on M*F will disappear. There may be an extension of the date, and (who knows) the “incompatibility” issue may be worked out, but in the meantime, I will be doing my best to back up and preserve as many of the thousands of posts as I can.

   If worst comes to worst, I will most certainly start over again. There’s only so much reading and watching I could do without being able to write about it all too, and I know that holds true for the many other contributors to this blog as well.

   And while I’m busy backing up an archive of the “Best of Mystery*File,” regular blogging will go on as usual. Count on it!

   Time for my semiannual mystery hardcover and paperback sale. The prices on the sites below are those as offered on Amazon. If ordered from me directly, take discounts of 10 to 40 percent.

         Paperbacks

         Trade Paperbacks

         Hardcovers

   If you’re like me, when you read James M. Cain’s classic novel The Postman Always Rings Twice the first time, or even if maybe you saw the movie before reading the book, and put it down or got up from watching, didn’t you kind of wonder, where the postman was? Did you miss something? I did.

   Here, finally is the answer. (Follow the link.)

   As some of you may know, I have been selling books on Amazon for as long as third party sellers have been allowed to do so there. Sales are decent there for recent books. Unfortunately, older books do not do nearly as well there. I have several thousand older mystery and western hardcovers that I would like to find new homes for, and to that end, I’ve just posted a first list of them online.

   To facilitate moving them out, I hope, I’ve priced them at half of what I believe is are “current market values,” as determined by doing some comparison shopping at abebooks.com.

   Some are extremely scarce and are priced accordingly, but many of them are $5.00 each, which is less than many new paperbacks at Barnes & Noble.

   Here’s the link to my first online list, with many more to come:

      https://mysteryfile.com/Books/VHC

   I hope you’ll take a look!

I’ve just updated my website where you can find a list of mystery paperbacks I have for sale on Amazon. If you buy them directly from me, however, I can offer a 30% discount. This list is larger by a third than the one I linked to over a year ago now.

Included is a large collection of Black Lizard “noir” paperbacks from the 1980s. Authors such as David Goodis, Jim Thompson and Charles Willeford. Lots of cozies, too, and everything in between.

Mystery Paperbacks

For those of you who are into such things, I’ve just put 24 old pulp magazines up for bids on eBay today. There are westerns, detective pulps, including two copies of Black Mask, and two copies of Unknown.

I hope this link works:

https://www.ebay.com/sch/lewis-62/m.html?item=273585679424&rt=nc&_trksid=p2047675.l2562

   Yesterday was a traveling day. I’ve spent the last week plus visiting Jon in L.A. I left last week from CT just as a huge system of thunderstorms made its way up the East Coast, making shambles of airline schedules all along its path.

   My plane was delayed two hours, and while I was sitting there, I chatted with an elderly couple also from CT on their way to Idaho to visit the woman’s sister. We finally took off, and naturally I never expected to see them again.

   Coming back from L.A. today, and you already know where this going, right? Of course you do. My stopover on the way back to Hartford was in Minneapolis, and when I was delivered to the gate where the plane to CT was waiting, I looked up and sitting across from me was the same couple I was talking to just over a week earlier, now on their way back to CT from Idaho.

   You couldn’t make up stuff like this and have anyone believe it if you tried.