In my teenaged years, when I traveled to my parents’ native Greece for the summers, I brought with me an entire duffel bag full of books. In high school, and taking myself seriously (too seriously) as a future novelist, I packed this second bag with entire bodies of work by authors I felt were Important. Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Faulkner: I knew these were the writers of the Great American Novels, and so I stuffed their paperbacks into my bag.
As a first-generation Greek/American, I didn’t exactly know what the literary canon was in English, the language I learned second while speaking Greek at home. I found my reading list through a combination of hearsay, high-school syllabi, and the serendipitous selections my father had made from his subscription to the Book of the Month Club. And so, among the Importants in my summer reading, I also included John Dos Passos and William Saroyan—whom I admire, but who are not often mentioned in the same breath as the others. One year I packed something by Thurber, a hardback copy of The Years With Ross about the famous editor of the New Yorker, which my father had selected from the Club brochure. I pored over Thurber’s tales of life at the magazine with dedication and reverence. Because of that Club and my father’s surely mistaken impressions of its title, I knew that Joyce’s Ulysses was Important. But it would be many years of trying before I could pull it off our bookshelf in the States and understand it. I never brought that book with me to Greece.
Since our time with family in Greece lasted the entire summer, I usually finished all the books I had brought with me before our return to the States. I could read in Greek, so I could have simply gone to any one of the local bookstores and purchased a Great Greek Novel. Instead, I went—year after year—to another one of my father’s literary collections: detective and crime paperbacks in English.
On the landing of my grandmother’s house in Athens was a small storage closet. Just to the left of the door was a two-shelf bookcase full of paperbacks my father had bought from Pantelides book store, purveyor of foreign-language literature in downtown Athens, and sadly now closed after decades in operation.
In the way that we remember clearest the beloved spaces that are lost to us, I could reconstruct that closet for you now inch by inch. (My parents had the house torn down to make way for a new building—a common practice in Greece, but a loss I still mourn.) The closet was narrow and long, and held rolled-up rugs that were taken up each spring and re-laid again in autumn, an old sewing machine, an armoire, and an icon with a perpetually-lit votive. The jumble of these things held its own charm for me. It was a tiny Narnia, a place of strange disorder in my grandmother’s otherwise proper home.
On the shelves of that bookcase were my father’s paperbacks by Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett, Erle Stanley Gardner, Eric Ambler, Agatha Christie, Leslie Charteris, with a Glenway Westcott thrown in too. The Westcott had earned its place by virtue of its title: Apartment in Athens. Many of these volumes were Pocket Books, with the message on the back that you could send the copy to “a boy in the armed forces” anywhere in the U.S. for only 4 cents. My father had written his name inside most of them. Lazaros Lazaridis, written in a tidy English cursive. The adult handwriting of his that I came to know was spiky and alive, not the careful lettering with which he claimed his teenaged purchases.
Every summer, I began my reading with what I believed to be the canonical works of American literature and finished up with mysteries and crime novels and thrillers. I loved those books. I loved the DeSotos and Duesenbergs and Pierce-Arrows that Simon Templar drove—the very names of the cars singing of glamor. I loved the adventure and urgency of crimes that needed to be solved. I loved the way that I had to slip inside the closet’s space, a space that was somehow extra to the daily living we did in my grandmother’s house. I never saw anyone else go in there all summer except me. It wouldn’t surprise me to know that, but for my visits, the door only opened when the rugs had to go in or come out. I loved that these books had been—were—my father’s and that he had bought them when he had been roughly my age. And that he had bought a few of them before the war, before the German Occupation, and the famine of 1941.
My father’s many stories of his experience during the war were tales of daring exploits, like the time he snuck into a German airbase and removed the chain from the steering mechanism of a Stuka, or the time he hid a camera inside his coat to photograph the German tanks as they first entered Athens. When I read his thrillers and espionage books decades after these reckless adventures, I could slide into that other era, into the daring and the danger, and I could imagine that I, too, lived in a time when what I did and saw carried enormous significance.
The paperbacks on that two-shelf bookcase shaped my tastes as a reader, I think, more than the suitcase full of Great American Novels I lugged with me over the years. I have a Ph.D. in English Literature, and I taught the subject for ten years to college students, so I have spent my fair share of reading time with the “fine” literature of the English language. But what I most enjoy is a novel that puts its fine-ness in service of a mystery, or a spy story, or a crime. Tana French, Mick Herron, Kate Atkinson’s Jackson Brodie books: these are the novels I hold to my heart when I have finished them. McEwan, too, whose plotlines are sometimes faulted for being almost grand guignol with obsessions and violence and danger lurking and then breaking through. I find works like this comforting, and it is surely because as I turn their pages I am transported to the wonders of that closet in my grandmother’s house. The way a duck imprints on its first living creature, I feel as though I imprinted on my father’s books. I hunger for language that works artistic marvels, but only if it’s making me desperate to see what happens next.
I have a recurring dream in which the architecture of a home that is supposed to be my home (but looks nothing like it) suddenly reveals itself to be more, bigger, wider than I knew it to be. My dream self will open a door to discover an entire wing, or a staircase to another story. I used to find these dreams troubling, even disappointing, as I woke to what now felt like a diminished reality. But I’ve come to see them for the creative reassurance I think they are. Through the door or up the stairs or down the new hallway is the extra space, the place full of surprise and wonderment. It’s the closet where the extra books are kept, with their hard-boiled detectives and their glamorous cars and their danger.
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