Stuart Kaminsky changed my life. This is not hyperbole. This is not a rhetorical gambit. It's God's honest Truth.
Until I was ten years old, mysteries were, to me, Encyclopedia Brown and a handful of aborted attempts to read The Hardy Boys. I fought through The Tower Treasure, got a dozen pages into The House on the Cliff, and gave it up for good. I fared slightly better with Nancy Drew, but not much. While I enjoyed the idea of a mystery, the concept of it as a narrative form, I was bored to tears by the execution.
To hear my mother tell it - and I've asked her about it - she went into the now-passed-into-memory Cloak and Dagger Mystery Bookshop in Santa Barbara, California, looking to buy some new reading for herself, and maybe a book for me. She asked the bookseller for a recommendation for her ten year-old son. What she left with was Murder on the Yellow Brick Road, which she then blithely handed to me.
To this day, I wonder what that bookseller was thinking. My best guess is that he or she hadn't actually read the book, and was rather looking to make the sale. Hey, that one there, it's got a Wizard of Oz reference. That'll be safe.
So very, very wrong.
So very, very right.
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