Prologue Books

Its purpose is to tell you enough about the book to steam you up into reading it. Jacket blurbs are usually written by publishers, and sometimes they fib a little about how wonderful the book is. But this time the publisher asked me, the author, to write the blurb. I suppose that, after publishing nine other Powell novels, Simon and Schuster feel I ought to do my own exaggerating for a change. So let’s get that over with: “This is a magnificent book and you’ll love every word of it.” Now we can relax. This is a mystery novel. The hero is a young Philadelphia art dealer who gets mixed up in dirty work in the field of art collecting. Maybe I shouldn’t call him a hero. If he ever did have the usual mystery story hero’s nerves of steel and muscles of iron, they certainly got badly rusted. He’s slow and cautious. In fact the guy admits that, in the great race of life,