Late to the party as usual I’m sure, but I’ve finally discovered Abe Books and am pretty excited. The first thing I did with the site was to search for five out-of-print Reginald Hill novels that I’d skipped over in working through the Dalziel-Pascoe series. This week they’ve been trickling in from five booksellers in five different states, all of this arranged in about ten minutes on the Abe site. Last night I started reading a widely adored one, Deadheads, whose out-of-print status has seemed especially inexplicable, and which arrived in the form of a 1983 Signet paperback that cost more to ship than to buy–but we’re still talking in the neighborhood of $5, and hey, I found it. Already in the first dozen pages I’ve been treated to lines like this:
Dalziel’s eyes glittered malevolently in his bastioned head like a pair of medieval defenders wondering where to pour the boiling oil.
Oh frabjous Abe!