Category: Very Likely Story

Dear Spencer for Hire,

How are things? Are you still detecting? Can you believe how Boston has changed recently? I went back to Boston last year with my family and it was a shock. So nice and bright and airy in the city after the Big Dig. Do you even recognize it? Does anyone get up to any shenanigans anymore for you to investigate?

And how’s Hawk? Susan? I haven’t been in touch with any of you in so long. That’s on me.

I was probably too young for them when I read your books, but that means that they stuck with me in indelible ways. The way I think about Boston, and running, and relationships, and beer drinking, and violence … I owe a lot of all of that to you.

Also, in my mind you are my Dad and he you, a little bit. Sub in accounting for PI work and a golf buddy for Hawk and we’re just about there. I like to think that by reading you and being my father’s daughter there is a little bit of tough old Boston in me too.

Hope you’re well,

-e.

Dear Sherlock Holmes Audio Cassettes,

I remember laying in our living room, one of you on the walkman, getting lost in Victorian England while gazing out the window onto our 1980s-something suburban front yard.

You came in a big plastic box. And each time I was done with one there was the joy of going back to the box to snap it into place and unsnap the next. A literal treasure box.

You belonged to my grandmother, who was losing her eyesight and unable to read. It was the first experience I had ever had with audiobooks but it didn’t take long before I was in love – it’s a unique pleasure to have someone read you a story. Is there a German or a Japanese word for that?

Thanks for the hours of stories. Thanks for being a bridge between my grandmother and me.

Keep on telling your tales,

-e.

Dear My Copy of Ten Little Indians,

Now you would be called And Then There Were None, which is far better of course, but in 1987 you were still Ten Little Indians.

I bought you at a book fair at my elementary school. What a wonderful event that was. Tables in the hallway piled with books so when you walked to the restroom you were walking in a book store. When you walked to the cafeteria: book store. I remember the doors propped open after school and the sunlight falling in rectangles onto the tables and the PTA mothers who were cashiering. Hands and arms exchanging books for money darted in and out of the light.

Do you remember how much you cost, My Copy? I don’t. I also don’t remember what else I bought that day. But I remember that you opened a world for me. Murder on the page! Evil caged by lines of text! A safe place in which to descend into chaos and evil and then – just in time – to watch it all get set right again. Oh and that ending! You knew all the time and didn’t give it away. You sly thing.

Thank you for setting me on my mystery journey, My Copy. You will always have a special place in my heart. (Though not my bookshelf because you, sadly, didn’t make it with me this far.) Maybe you are pulped now because of your racist title. Maybe your paper lives on in another book, on another shelf somewhere. If so, I hope a trace of my happiness from the time we spent together is imprinted somewhere in your aura. Maybe it beckons to other young readers – “Come, begin something here, with me.”

With so much gratitude,

-e.