So, here's a book. You can find it, maybe, on the discount table of a local bookstore, or through Alibris, Amazon, or one of the other online purveyors of used books. I tend to use abebooks.com, where a mass-market paperback edition is currently listed for $5.50 plus $3.00 shipping—which is too much to pay for Reverend Randollph and the Holy Terror, a 1982 mystery novel by Charles Merrill Smith.
Not that Smith wrote particularly bad mysteries. A Methodist clergyman who achieved some fame with a satirical 1965 book called How to Become a Bishop Without Being Religious, Smith decided to try his hand at popular fiction—and from 1974 until his death in 1986, he produced six volumes about Con Randollph, a former professional quarterback for the Los Angeles Rams who, after retirement, became the pastor of a Protestant church in downtown Chicago. To leaf through any of Smith's mysteries is to discover that they're smoothly written, nicely plotted, and mildly comic.
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