I did go out in the end, by myself; I went to the Feria del Libro and came back with four detective novels. I hadn’t even heard of one of them, though it’s by a writer I collect. Another is that Ellery Queen book, Drury Lane’s Last Case. It was still there and I decided to go ahead and buy it, in spite of everything. After all, when I’m in one of these extended phases in which I want to read detective novels more than any other kind of book, my thinking is: better to have something not very good to read than to have nothing at all. Addictions are like that, and you can end up suffering terrible humiliations out of desperation for the drug. I’ll end up reading Agatha Christie one day, I know it.