I am a great reader of paperbacks.

I love their flexibility and lightness.  I scribble in the margins and put multiple asterisks next to passages without worrying about defacing the book.  (Later, unless you are James Wood, you will wonder why you marked those passages.)  Over the years the pages of paperbacks tan and the spines crack, and if you read them over and over, as I do, you occasionally have to replace them.  What is the lifespan of the average paperback?  Twenty years?  Fifty?

I always think the Beatles song is “Paperback Reader,”  when actually it is “Paperback Writer.”  I suppose that is because I read so many paperbacks I cannot imagine writing them.

Dear Sir or Madam, will you read my book?
It took me years to write, will you take a look?
It’s based on a novel by a man named Lear
And I need a job so I want to be a paperback writer
Paperback writer!

Mysteries should always be read in paperback, don’t you think?

I recently rediscovered the mystery writer Josephine Tey.  Someone commented about her at this blog. Thank you!

I have had to replace my old paperback copies.

My favorite of her novels, The Daughter of Time,  is not just for mystery fans. She wrote her classics during the  Golden Age  of Detective Fiction (1920-1950), a period dominated by the likes of Agatha Christie, Margery Allingham, and Michael Innes)  The Daughter of Time appeals equally to historians, scholars,  fans of Shakespeare’s Richard III., and skeptical readers of newspapers.  The detective hero so loathes the adage “There’s no smoke without fire,” that he spends the book proving its preposterousness.

In this historical mystery classic, Inspector Alan Grant of Scotland Yard, the hero of six of Tey’s books,  is bedridden in the hospital with a broken leg.  Restless and bored, he does not feel like reading.    He dismisses the best-sellers on the nightstand as tripe.

And the books on the nightstand do sound awful.  There are Silas Weekley’s The Sweat and the Furrow, a romance called Bells on Her Toes, and Oscar Oakley’s latest tough-guy novel.

But Alan is especially displeased by a mystery.

“The Case of the Missing Tin Opener, by John James Mark, had three errors of procedure in the first three pages, and had at least provided Grant with a pleasant five minutes while he composed an imaginary letter to its author.

Then his friend Marta Hallard, the actress, brings him a quarto envelope of historical portraits.  He is fsacinated by a portrait of Richard III from the National Gallery by an unknown artist.  Grant, who has seen the faces of many criminals, does not think this is the face of a murderer.

And so he begins to investigate the case of Richard III from his hospital bed.  He borrows a nurse’s school history books, then asks a friend to buy histories and bioraphies at a bookstore, and then finds help from an American researcher at the British Museum.

Everything you have been told turns out to be wrong, as in a game of Telephone.  But you have to read the book.  This is really a case where spoilers will ruin it!

Tey is well-loved by mystery writers as well as fans.  In the mystery writer Robert Barnard’s introductin to my new Touchstone edition of The Daughter of Time, he says that her fans “regard her with love.  They give to their favorite Tey novel what they once gave to their favorite books of childhood, to The Wind in the Willows, Little Women, or whatever:  unconditional enthusiasm.”

True in my case.

Such a remarkable book, and it SHOULD BE READ IN PAPERBACK.  Does anyone want to argue that point?!!!!??????