Bernie Rhodenbarr – 10

Once again, it's my great pleasure to thank Writers Room, of Greenwich Village, where some preliminary work on this book was done, and Ragdale, of Lake Forest, Illinois, where it was written.

A good thing about writing, so they tell me, is that you can do it anywhere. Well, the hell you can. ButI can, in these two blessed places, and I am forever grateful to them.

The man," said my friend Marty Gilmartin, "is an absolute…a complete…an utter and total…" He held out his hands, shook his head, and sighed. "Words fail me."

"Apparently," I agreed. "Nouns, anyway. Adjectives seem to be supporting you well enough, but nouns-"

"Help me out, Bernard," he said. "Who is more qualified to supplyle mot juste? Words, after all, are your métier."

"They are?"

"Books are your stock-in-trade," he said, "and what is a book? Paper and ink and cloth and glue, to be sure, but if a book were nothing more than those mundane components, no one would want to own more than one of them. No, it's the words that constitute a book, sixty or eighty or a hundred thousand of them."

"Or two hundred thousand, or even three." I'd readGrub Street recently, and was thinking about the less-than-eminent Victorians George Gissing wrote about, forced by their publishers to grind out interminable three-volume novels for a body of readers who clearly had far too much time on their hands.

"That's more words than I require," Marty said. "Just one, Bernie, to sum up"-he glanced around the room, lowered his voice-"no, toimpale Crandall Rountree Mapes like an insect upon a pin."