False Colors

What you re starting to read now is called a jacket blurb. 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, he s just along for the walk. He gets scared in tough spots. I felt sorry about shoving him into so much trouble, even though I did give him a jet-propelled blonde heroine as a sort of workmen s compensation for his injuries. Still and all, there are easier ways of winning a pretty blonde than by battling strong-arm guys, gunmen and a murderer, and I think my hero would have preferred them. I know I would.

This story took a lot of research. I read stacks of art books, and talked to artists and dealers. I prowled through museums peering at famous paintings through a magnifying glass. My new knowledge even impresses my artist friends, and it s mighty hard for a writer to impress an artist. To most artists, a writer is a vandal who takes white space that could be used for pictures and clutters it up with words.

I ve tried to get some of the flavor of Philadelphia into the book. That s an elusive thing to pin down in words, but here s an example of what Philadelphia is like. In most cities, if you owned a valuable old Chippendale chair, you would call everyone s attention to your prize. In Philadelphia, you would sit in it.

I hope you like the book. Don t try to please me by saying you stayed up after midnight finishing it, though. It never seems fair to me that people can read in just a few hours something that took me a year to write.

--Richard Powell"