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I've been reading some of the Hard Case Crime books of late -- the hot weather has me in the mood for noir-ish fluff, I guess -- and they inspired me to finally dip into Ross MacDonald's Lew Archer series. I think I read one of them years ago and liked it okay, but I wasn't moved to read more.
But I thought that this time I might start at the beginning and see how it goes. So I'm reading the first in the series, The Moving Target (1949).
I made it a point to buy the first paperback edition from an online used-book seller (why do I care about reading books in their early editions? Something about anachronistic covers on old titles bugs me. I want an edition that reflects and resembles the story within, somehow).
And in this edition, they did a very smart, very simple thing: After the introductory pages -- the title page, the copyright page, etc. -- there's a two-page listing entitled Cast of Characters that looks something like this:
| Lew Archer private detective specializing in divorce ............................... | 1 |
| Mrs. Kromberg housekeeper at the Sampson estate .................................. | 2 |
| Elaine Sampson not-so-loving wife of a millionaire ........................................ | 3 |
| Felix Observant Filipino houseboy ............................................... | 7 |
I find this very helpful, as, any time I don't quickly finish a novel like this (like, within two or three days), I find, when I pick it up after two or three days' break, I don't quite remember who Albert Graves is or Mrs. Cramm. And providing the page number on which the character first appears is that much more helpful.
Like I said, it's the simplest little thing to do, but I think it's a great idea. Would that every mystery -- heck, every published novel -- included the same feature.