Mystery

What he could remember without any difficulty at all was being alone and reading. His year at home divided itself into three sections—the eras of bed, wheelchair, and crutches—and during these, he read nearly every one of the books in his parents’ house and virtually all of the books his father carried home, six at a time, from the public library. He read with nothing but appetite—without discrimination or judgment, sometimes without understanding. Tom reread all of his old children’s books, read his father’s Zane Grey, Eric Ambler, and Edgar Rice Burroughs, and his mother’s S. S. Van Dine, E. Phillips Oppenheim, Michael Arlen, Edgar Wallace, and The Search for Bridey Murphy. He read Sax Rohmer, H. P. Lovecraft, and Bulfinch’s Mythology. He read the dog novels of Albert Payson Terhune, and the horse novels of Will James, and Call of the Wild, Black Beauty, and Frog by Colonel S. P. Meeker. He read a novel by a Hungarian about Galileo. He read hotrod novels by Henry Gregor Felsen, especially Street Rod, in which a boy was killed in an automobile accident. When his father began taking books from the library, he raced through everything they had by Agatha Christie, Ngaio Marsh, Dashiell Hammett, and Raymond Chandler. He read Murder, Incorporated, about the careers of Louis “Lepke” Buchalter and Abe “Kid Twist” Reles. Once an irritated Victor Pasmore came into the living room holding a bagful of hardback Nero Wolfe novels by Rex Stout that Lamont von Heilitz had pressed into his hands with instructions to give them to Tom, and Tom read them all in a row, one after the other. He read approximately one-third of the Bible and one-half of a collection of Shakespeare’s plays that he found propping up a goldfish bowl. He went through Sherlock Holmes and Richard Hannay and Lord Peter Wimsey. He read Jurgen and Topper and Slan. He read novels in which young governesses went to ancient family estates in France and fell in love with young noblemen who might have been smugglers, but were not. He read Dracula and Wuthering Heights and Bleak House. After that he was launched into Dickens, and read Great Expectations, The Pickwick Papers, Martin Chuzzlewit, Dombey and Son, The Mystery of Edwin Drood, Our Mutual Friend, A Tale of Two Cities, and David Copperfield. On the recommendation of the puzzled librarian, he went from Dickens to Wilkie Collins, and lapped up The Moonstone, No Name, Armadale, and The Woman in White. He failed with Edith Wharton, another of the librarian’s recommendations, but struck gold again with Mark Twain, Richard Henry Dana, and Edgar Allan Poe. Then he stumbled upon The Castle of Otranto, The Monk, and Great Tales of Terror and the Supernatural. Mr. von Heilitz once again intercepted his father on the street, and passed along The House of the Arrow and Trent’s Last Case and Brat Farrar.