Memoir: My First Literary Crime

When a teenager's love becomes obsession

I did all right in middle school but hated math and science because they required a monotonous precision that I could not bring myself to muster. I loved any subject involving reading because that was what I did when I was alone, which by my own choice was most of the time. I’d save my allowance to buy 98 cent books from pharmacies and discount variety stores – pocket-sized adventure and mystery paperbacks stuffed onto rotating black wire racks, usually with colorfully lurid cover art, churned out by mass-market publishers like Fawcett, Bantam, Dell, and Avon, written by Stephen King, Agatha Christie, Robert Ludlum, and Alistair MacLean – names never mentioned in future literature classes.

Alone in my room, I’d survey my growing library of paperbacks neatly aligned along the edge of the shelf next to my bed and feel a joyful love for their precisely rendered worlds. The spy stories and whodunnits offered what reality couldn’t: clarity of action and satisfying outcomes. I felt closer to…