![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() They bought all the new hardcover mysteries, but here’s what was remarkable- they never got rid of anything! The Collier brothers were more likely to part company with a dead cat than was the Merc to deaccession a ten-year-old mystery novel. I’ve no idea what it cost to be a member, but it couldn’t have been much, and the place was heaven for an aficionado of popular fiction. I also wanted to read crime novels, so I bought a batch of paperbacks around town, but then I discovered The Mercantile Library on East 47th Street, just a block from my office. A Times Square shop on Eighth Avenue had a huge stock of back-date magazines, priced at two for 25¢, and I wasn’t making much money, but a five-dollar bill went a long way there. Since I was writing and selling short crime fiction, I set out to read my way through all the back copies I could find of Manhunt and its imitators. I had actually sold a few short crime stories of my own and decided that my progress in this field could only be enhanced by increasing my familiarity with what others had written. I remember a few other Brown novels I read very early on- The Screaming Mimi, The Wench is Dead, Here Comes a Candle-but whether I read Clipjoint then or a little later is impossible to say.īecause two years later, an even ten years after its publication, I had dropped out of Antioch to work as an assistant editor at a literary agency in New York. Was The Fabulous Clipjoint one of those early reads? It seems likely, but I can’t be sure. ![]()
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