Chronology blues and a note on tables

I found an error (thanks to Charles Ardai’s excellent introduction to Deadly Edge, Slayground, and Plunder Squad), that’s likely been here since this site went up in rudimentary form eleven years ago.

The Blackbird was not published in 1971. It was published in 1969. It predates Deadly Edge and Slayground.

This will throw a wrench into the works of those of you who insist on reading series books in order, because the publication order is:

• The Blackbird
• Deadly Edge
• Slayground

…but the chronological order is:

• Deadly Edge
• Slayground
• The Blackbird

So what’s a reader to do?

My personal recommended reading order is:

• Deadly Edge
• The Blackbird
• Slayground

…but to each his own.

That bit of trivia gives me an excuse to post this excellent German cover sent by reader Manuel. The blackbird on the cover doesn’t look remotely like an African revolutionary, but she does look awful cute.

This is as good a time as any to note that I’ve switched the list of Parker books and the Westlake bibliography from HTML tables to embedded Google Docs. They’ve lost some in visual appeal, but Google spreadsheets are much easier to edit. Editing HTML tables is an absolute bitch, so I’ll take the trade-off.

I’m not done testing on all popular browsers yet, so they may look a little ugly in whatever you’re using. They are currently optimized for Windows Firefox.