McBain's Ladies Too: More Women of the 87th Precinct

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When my publisher asked me to write an introduction to McBain's Ladies, the volume that preceded this one, I wrote to him as follows:

That is what I wrote on August 28, 1987.

As I sit at the keyboard now, it is a bit more than a year later.

And I am writing an introduction.

You may wonder why.

I’ll tell you why.

Too many people questioned the motives behind McBain's Ladies. One reviewer went so far as to suggest that a venal publisher decided to take (and I quote) "pecuniary advantage of Joe Public. That's you." Since McBain's Ladies did not contain any "new piece of work, essay, glossary, critical piece," or even the boring introduction my publisher had requested, the argument was that we were stealing tons of money from unsuspecting readers by selling them a mere book of excerpts. I would hate to tell that reviewer how little money I received for putting together both books; the knowledge would entirely destroy his theory. But in a profit-seeking world, profit-seeking motives are naturally expected. And when they are not there, they are imagined to be there.

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