I am stunned. Now that I am up and about again, the summer has become a chimera- a missing chapter. I am tempted to put on my Sherlock Deerstalker cap and go look for where it went.

All the time spent flat on my back was not wasted: I managed to fill it up with detectives. They all seem to be the same guy. He lives in different places.

The Craig Johnson series of Walt Longmire stories features a Wyoming County Sheriff who used to be an interior lineman at USC and quotes the classics.

The C.J. Box series of Joe Picket who-dunnits features the most astonishing Fish and Wildlife Game Warden who ever didn’t live.

Robert Parker, who last I ran into with his Spencer series, contributes Jesse Stone in Paradise, Mass. You may have run into him on the small screen with Tom Selleck playing Jesse.

A little more obscure is Jon Loomis, who contributes beleaguered Police Detective Frankie Coffin in a sharply witty mystery series set in Provincetown, Mass.

I know this is way too narrow, and I was thankful my pal Jerry insisted on something far away and written by a remarkable woman.

Donna Leon does a fine job with her Commissario Brunetti novels. All of them are on my iPad somewhere, though as summer comes to an end, I do not know if I will run out of her. All here stories are set in or around her adopted home-town of Venice.

I took up Donna so that I could not be accused of misogyny, either by the sex of the authors or the location in just two American states.

Did I waste the summer?

Yes. I could have concentrated on that Coursera on-line college thing I blundered into. I am struggling like hell to stay attached to something called “The History of the Internet,” which I have found is actually my history, and yours, and just the blink of a gnat’s eye in the scheme of time.

The idea that all of this stuff lives on my iPad, something else that didn’t exist until fifteen minutes ago, and that all of it can be lugged to bed or down to the pool deck now that I can do it again boggles the mind. With the exception of those collector editions of books from the Folio Society, I am not sure I am going to buy another hard copy novel.

That challenge is that, as a writer myself, I am not actually writing anything at all in a physical sense, is another freaking mystery.

Copyright 2012 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com