I’ve been doing a Marie Kondo lately with our overflow of books, holding various volumes in my hand to see if they sparked joy, or at least decide if they were useful. If not, maybe I should get rid of them–mainly to make room for more books.

Yet a writer can’t help agonizing over whether to discard a book. People put their hearts into writing them, and that includes commercial authors who publish a book a year. Over time, I’ve talked to several successful genre writers, people whose books… let’s just say they’re not to my taste. Well, some are so badly written I feel nasty reading them. Yet I find these writers are every bit as proud of their work as, say, Louise Glück must be of her brilliant collections of poetry. I also suspect that many of them privately think they’re just as good as Glück, at least in their own genre. By and large, writers are pretty terrible at evaluating our own work. We have to be, or many of us would do something more sensible with our time. Like get a job.

But what should I do with a book like Murder in the Mews by Helen Reilly, an 85-year-old crime novel I found on the shelf? I’d forgotten that I’d bought the thing. Hadn’t read it. From the looks of it, I never really bought it to read, but picked it up for the design. The copy I have is a striking hard cover first edition published in 1931 by The Crime Club, a division of Doubleday, Doran and Company, Inc. I have no memory of where I got it.

Opening the book, I could see that I probably bought it as a joke. The victim is a man named Knox, like my husband, and on page one, Reilly’s detective calls up a journalist, also like my husband, to help him chase the murderer around New York.

Reading it one night, and found that Reilly’s detective is Inspector Christopher McKee, usually called the Scotchman, a reference to his nationality rather than his drink, although there’s a lot of that. Inspector McKee is a hardboiled New York detective assigned to Manhattan around 1930. Aside from his nickname, he isn’t given much individuality, at least until a later scene when we’re told McKee has only recently learned to drive, and see him bashing his car into obstacles, including a horse and cart. New York has more personality than McKee does: its speakeasies and slums and the titular mews, described with love and particularity.

“He and Joan had been having tea at Jabowski’s, one of those little Russian places to which everyone goes at once and then suddenly to which no one goes at all, so that they vanish without leaving a trace.”

“It was dusk when she came out of the subway and turned to the right. She knew the locality fairly well and found the street slanting bleakly away in the twilight with the little park opposite, very green and still in the gray haze of evening. The baby-carriage parade had retired for the night. Windows in graystone blocks were lighting up. Here and there a radio boomed.”

“It was a handsome house of gray stone, in the American basement fashion. A door protected by an ornate iron grill, with some windows at each side, opened directly off the pavement, with the main apartments on the floor above. The house was flanked on one side by a towering hotel and on the other by houses like itself, fine, old-fashioned private residences slowly retreating before the fashionable shops and apartment hotels that were invading the entire district. There was nothing as vulgar as a show window, but a small black enameled sign that bore the name ‘Madame Gessler’ on it in green letters.”

Nosing around online, I found that Helen Reilly had churned out 34 detective novels from 1930 until her death in 1962—37 if you count three books written under the name Kieran Abbey—more than one a year. Golden Age detective aficionados seem to think Murder in the Mews isn’t as good as her later titles, being only the second appearance of Inspector McKee, and a beginner effort.

Is it worth any money? Something I’ve been asking before discarding older titles. According to abebooks, my edition of Murder in the Mews sells for between US $19 and $35, although there are two copies of a rare paperback edition listed for US $225.05 and $361.69, which sent me downstairs for a search.

My husband has a pulp fiction collection numbering about 1,000 titles. Add that to the other 2,500-plus books in the house and you can see why I’ve been culling. A look through his pulp collection didn’t turn up the rare paperback, but I found a copy of Reilly’s Murder in Shinbone Alley, another Inspector McKee mystery, this one from the Popular Library (“Mysteries of Proven Merit”) published in 1944 and listed as A Wartime Book.

“This complete and unabridged edition is produced in compliance with government regulations conserving paper and other critical materials”—which seem to include periods, since there isn’t one at the end of the sentence.

Unhappily, this second Inspector McKee novel is only listed for only five bucks on abebooks. And like most pulps, Murder in Shinbone Alley was so cheaply produced that it’s now too delicate to read, the spine threatening to crack even when carefully half-opened.

Query: Is it still a book if you can’t read it?

Maybe my husband’s old pulps have ceased to be books and become artifacts, interesting because of the cover design, and because they provide insight into what people read in the 1930s, 40s and 50s: what mysteries, what reprinted literature, which books of advice, what sort of sports books and serious non-fiction were popular.

And if you can actually read old works of popular fiction, as I did Murder in the Mews, maybe they’ve become reference works. I didn’t not enjoy the book, if I can put it like that, but I wasn’t riveted, nor think it was a lost work of great literature.

Yet as I held the book in my hand, Kondo-fashion, I hesitated to discard it, wondering if it could prove useful one day in researching a novel I might write set during the 1930s. It provides a window into the diction, the slang and preoccupations of the period, and allows me to imagine the soundscape: blaring radios and the parade of baby-carriages, some of which probably squeaked. The price tag means it’s a bit of a rarity, and probably hard to find. It’s not available in the Toronto Public Library system, even for reference. In fact, there’s only one Helen Reilly mystery in the Toronto collection (although there are multiple copies available of Agatha Christie’s 1937 story collection, also called Murder in the Mews, which features her detective Hercule Poirot).

I have no plans to write a book set during the 1930s, especially in New York. But as I held it in my hand, I wondered if I might? And Murder in the Mews was in the house already? And the cover was kind of cool? And poor Helen Reilly? Shouldn’t I honour her 37-book career by nestling her on the shelf beside Ian Rankin? Whose Inspector Rebus detective novels are already being said to provide a valuable social history of Edinburgh?

Query the second: When does a book cease to be a read for enjoyment and turn into a reference work? I suspect it takes a shockingly short period of time. I recently tried to re-read an old Inspector Rebus novel from the 1990s, one of the first, and found that it had grown dusty and predictable, even though I couldn’t recall whodunnit, and remembered that I’d liked it the first time I’d read it. The passage of time is cruel to writers, and my feeling of protectiveness toward long-dead, unknown Helen Reilly, whose book I only half liked, made me Kondo-onto Murder in the Mews for an unproductively long period of time.

In a recent neighbourhood street sale, I’d bought an old teapot, telling the guy selling it that I’d bought exactly the same teapot when I was 17. It might have been the first piece of crockery I’d ever bought, and somewhere along the line I’d broken or discarded it. So I guess I’d buy this one, I told him, along with the cream and sugar set. And maybe a couple of plates?

“Sentimentality is the enemy of order,” he said, wrapping them up.

I looked it up later. He wasn’t quoting anything; no piece of ancient wisdom. He was also right.

Yet I put Murder in the Mews back on the shelf, resolving to take less time deciding whether or not to discard the next book. I’ll probably fail. But I’ve recently put 50 or 60 books in boxes on the curb and my neighbours have hovered them up. And I’ve found a link to a guy who comes your house to pick up boxes of discards. He runs a company called Second Life Books. “Because every book deserves a second chance,” his website says.

I wish I could learn to give them just two.