The Bookman's Wake Read online

  IT’S ALL IN THE BOOKS . . .

  National bestselling author JOHN DUNNING is

  “A master yarn-spinner whose prose is so mesmerizing that you hate to come to the end of the tale.”

  —Chicago Sun-Times

  and his thrillers are

  “Mad, fantastical, and darkly original.”

  —Kirkus Reviews

  THE BOOKMAN’S PROMISE

  “A thorough delight. . . . No crime writer has ever written more knowledgeably or more entertainingly about the world of rare books than John Dunning. . . . Impeccably plotted, with characters who spring to life and bits of arcana about Burton and the rare-book trade.”

  —Otto Penzler, The New York Sun

  “A guaranteed high-five moment for suspense lovers. . . . As usual, Dunning throws out intriguing tidbits on book collecting. You will surely be inspired to buy one great, hellacious, killer book: Dunning’s next novel.”

  —Miami Herald

  “Bookman devotees should be overjoyed.”

  —The Denver Post

  “Dunning and Janeway can’t be beat.”

  —The Clarion-Ledger (Jackson, MS)

  Also Available from Simon & Schuster Audio

  “The combination of Burton the adventurer-author and Janeway the cop-bookseller is a match made in crime-fiction heaven.”

  —Booklist

  “Endlessly inventive, exhilarating, and literate. Quite a knockout punch.”

  —Kirkus Reviews

  THE BOOKMAN’S WAKE

  A New York Times Notable Book of the Year

  “Nail-biting suspense. . . . Richer, better, and stronger than its predecessor.”

  —The Denver Post

  “Not only kept me up far too late one night, but got me up two hours early the next morning.”

  —Boston Sunday Globe Magazine

  “Bookbinding has never been so compelling.”

  —Kirkus Reviews

  “Stunning.”

  —Associated Press

  “[Dunning] immerses the reader in this intriguing, little-known milieu without losing sight of the page-turning yarn he’s spinning.”

  —People

  “[A] ‘don’t miss’ mystery.”

  —The Kansas City Star

  BOOKED TO DIE

  Winner of the Nero Wolfe Award

  “No one . . . can fail to be delighted by the sort of folkloric advice Janeway carries with him.”

  —Boston Sunday Globe

  “Fascinating. . . . Assured and muscular prose.”

  —San Francisco Chronicle

  “Very credible. . . . An involved tale that satisfies the mystery reader’s wants.”

  —United Press International

  “Memorable. . . . Compelling. . . . Vividly realistic . . . fascinating and utterly convincing. . . . A suspenseful, well-crafted mystery.”

  —Mystery Scene

  “A perfect mystery. It’s intelligently written, the action is bafflingly logical; the reader learns something, and it’s got a sucker punch of a finale.”

  —St. Petersburg Times (FL)

  “Crisp, direct prose and pitch-perfect dialogue enhance this meticulously detailed page-turner.”

  —Publishers Weekly (starred review)

  “An intriguing peek inside the antiquarian book business. . . . Book lovers will be fascinated.”

  —Houston Chronicle

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  Contents

  Book I: Eleanor

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Book II: Trish

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Book III: The Raven

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Chapter 53

  Chapter 54

  Chapter 55

  Chapter 56

  Chapter 57

  Chapter 58

  Chapter 59

  ‘The Bookman’s Promise’ Excerpt

  To Jack Kisling of Hairline Press, who navigates with a steady hand the eddies and shoals of the printshop.

  Again, prices on actual books discussed by characters in the story may be a year or two out-of-date. In a time of madness, when a new novel can bring ten times its cover price a year after publication, prices become obsolete almost as they’re published. Janeway remains a cynic when people pay too much too soon and glorify the trendy. But he is an equal-opportunity cynic who saves his deepest skepticism for me, when he and I are alone at four-thirty in the morning.

  Another tip of the hat to Warwick Downing, who bullied me for three years. To George Fowler for turning me left and right in the Seattle rain. To Pat McGuire for long friendship and a kick in the duff when I needed it. And a kind word for the small-press publishers of today. Some still struggle valiantly in the great lost cause.

  The man in St. Louis died sometime during the afternoon, as near as the coroner could figure it. It happened long ago, and today it is only half-remembered even by old-timers who follow crime news. The victim was eccentric and rich: that, combined with the inability of the police to identify either a motive or a suspect, kept it on front pages for a week. Then the press lost interest. Reporters had been charmed by the puzzle, and by the colorful background of the deceased, but they could only sell that for a few days and then something new had to happen. It didn’t—the case slipped off the front pages and became history, perhaps to be resurrected periodically in anniversary pieces or in magazine accounts of unsolved mysteries. On the news desk at the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, an editor ripped and read an AP squib about a triple murder in Phoenix, fifteen hundred miles to the southwest and thought—not for the first time—that the world was getting dangerously crowded with crazy people. He considered using it as a two-graph filler on page eight: then he thought, Christ, we’ve got enough crazy people of our own, and the Phoenix murders got bumped by a UPI account of a squabble along the Chinese-Russian border. In Phoenix, that day and for the rest of the week, the case was front-page news. The cops didn’t have a clue. If murder had to happen, said the cop in charge of the Phoenix case, it should at least be logical. It’s not the garden-variety passion killer we find scary, the cop said, it
’s the guy who kills for no good reason and then disappears into the night. The police hardly ever catch him because he strikes without reason and has no motive. The trouble with random murder is that all the common denominators are superficial. The killer may break in the same way, he may use the same weapon, but there is never anything that hints of a motive because there isn’t any. Give me a motive, other than craziness, said the cop, and I’ll clear this case. That cop didn’t know, because it didn’t make the papers in Phoenix and was one among many brutal homicides on the national teletype as the long weekend began, that a Baltimore man had just been killed in much the same way. This time there was a survivor—his wife, blind from birth and left babbling madly in the killer’s wake. She was useless as a witness and was soon committed to a state institution, but perhaps even then she might have had something to tell an investigator with knowledge of Phoenix and St. Louis and the perspective to see them all as a single case. But computers weren’t yet in broad general use: communities separated by vast distances weren’t linked as they are today; murders weren’t grouped electronically by such factors as weaponry, forensic matching, and killer profiles. There was the teletype, with its all-points bulletins advising that murders had been committed, but what else was new? The term serial killer had not yet entered the common lexicon, and to most people it was inconceivable that a killer might strike in St. Louis on Monday, Phoenix on Wednesday, and in a Baltimore suburb on Friday night. On Sunday there was a double murder in Idaho—a rancher and his wife killed just as they were sitting down to dinner. This was big news in Boise, but it made hardly a ripple in St. Louis, Phoenix, or Baltimore. On the ninth day the killer struck for the last time—an elderly woman living alone in New Orleans. This time he set fire to the house, hoping, police theorized, to cover up his crime. In each of the five cities teams of detectives worked their local angles and found nothing. They sifted false clues, chased down rumors, and slowly over the weeks watched their final leads disappear into the big blank wall. The one common denominator remained hidden by the vast expanse of geography and by the often cryptic methods of police teletyping.

  No one knew it then, but in each of the death houses lived a book collector.

  That’s how I got into it, more than twenty years later.

  BOOK I

  ELEANOR

  1

  Slater wasn’t my kind of cop. Even in the old days, when we were both working the right side of the good-and-evil beat, I had been well able to take Mr. Slater or leave him alone. He had played such a small part in my life that, for a moment, I didn’t know who he was. I was working in my office, a small room in the rear of the used-and-rare bookstore I owned in Denver, writing up books for my first catalog, when Millie buzzed me from the front. “There’s a Mr. Slater here to see you,” she said, and the last person I would’ve thought about—did think about—was Clydell. This was annoying. My work was going slowly: I was an absolute novice at bibliography, and even with modern books there are pitfalls everywhere. Open on the table before me was a copy of Nickel Mountain, by John Gardner, as fresh and crisp as the day it was born in 1973. Gardner had signed it on the half title, a nice little touch, since he won’t be signing any more, that almost doubled its value. It’s not yet an expensive book—about $25-40 unsigned, in fine first edition—the kind of book that should be a snap to describe and price. The publisher was Alfred A. Knopf, who not only puts out fine books but also gives you the straight bibliographical poop. He’s not like Lippincott, who states first edition most of the time, or McGraw-Hill, who states it when the guy in the back shop feels like putting it on: if Knopf says it’s a first edition, you can take it to the bank and cash it . . . although I do remember one or two Willa Cathers that might or might not follow tradition. Let’s face it, all these houses are dotted with land mines. William Morrow was a model of consistency, but on one pricey little Harry Crews title, instead of noting second printing as always before, he put two tiny dots at the bottom of the copyright page. Cute, Morrow. That little piece of camouflage cost me $40 for a spectacular nonfirst last year. Doubleday always, and I mean always, puts the words first edition on his copyright page and takes it off for later printings. But on one John Barth he didn’t: he put no designation whatever, instead hiding a code in the gutter of the last two pages. The code must say H-18—not H-38 or H-Is-for-Homicide or H-anything-else—or it’s not a first. Harper and Row was as reliable as Knopf over the years, except in one five-year period, circa 196873, when for reasons known only to Messrs. Harper and Row in that great bookstore in the sky, they started putting a chain of numbers on the last page, for Christ’s sake, in addition to saying first edition up front. Figure that out. The only way I can figure it out is that people who publish books must hate and plot against people who cherish them, make collectibles of them, and sell them. I can just see old Harper and Row, rubbing their translucent hands together and cackling wildly as some poor slob shells out his rent money, $700, for a One Hundred Years of Solitude, only to discover that he’s got a later state, worth $40 tops. Harper really outdid himself on this title: in addition to hiding the chain of numbers (the first printing of which begins with “1”), he also published a state that has no numbers at all. This is widely believed to be the true first, though there can still be found a few keen and knowledgeable dealers who would beg to differ. The one certainty is that on any Harper title for that era, the back pages must be checked. Thus concealed are points on early Tony Hillermans in the $750-and-up range, some Dick Francis American firsts (the numbers on one of which seems to begin with “2,” as no “1” has ever been seen), a good Gardner title, and, of course, Solitude, a fall-on-your-sword blunder if you make it, the rent’s due, and the guy who sold it to you has gone south for the winter.

  So I was stuck on Nickel Mountain, with a guy I didn’t want to see storming my gates up front. I was stuck because I seemed to remember that there were two states to this particular book, A. A. Knopf notwithstanding. I had read somewhere that they had stopped the presses in the middle of the first printing and changed the color on the title page. God or the old man or someone high in the scheme of things didn’t like the hue, so they changed it from a deep orange to a paler one. Technically they are both first editions, but the orange one is a first-first, thus more desirable. It’s no big deal, but this was my first catalog and I wanted it to be right. The title page looked pretty damn orange to me, but hot is hot only when you have cold to compare it with. Go away, Slater, I thought.

  I took an index card out of my desk, wrote check the color, and stuck it in the book. I told Millie to send the bastard back, and I got ready to blow him off fast if he turned out to be a dealer in snake oil or a pitchman for a lightbulb company. Even when he came in, for a moment I didn’t know him. He was wearing a toupee and he’d had his front teeth pulled. The dentures were perfect: you couldn’t tell the hairpiece from the real thing, unless you’d known him in the days when the tide was going out. His clothes were casual but expensive. He wore alligator shoes and the briefcase he carried looked like the hide of some equally endangered animal. His shirt was open and of course he wore a neckchain. The only missing effect was the diamond in the pierced ear, but I knew it was only a matter of time before he’d get to that too.

  “You fuckhead,” he said. “Lookitcha, sittin’ there on your damn dead ass with no time to talk to an old comrade-in-arms.”

  “Hello, Clydell,” I said without warmth. “I almost didn’t know you.”

  He put his thumbs in his lapels and did the strut. On him it was no joke. “Not bad, huh? My gal Tina says I look twenty years younger.”

  Tina, yet. An instant picture formed in my mind— young, achingly beautiful, and so totally without brains that she just missed being classified as a new species in the animal kingdom.

  “You’re the last guy I’d ever expect to see in a bookstore, Clydell,” I said, trying to keep it friendly.

  “I am a doer, not a reader. It’s good of you to remember.”


  “Oh, I remember,” I said, sidestepping the gentle dig.

  “My deeds of daring have become legends among the boys in blue. I’m still one of their favorite topics of conversation, I hear. So are you, Janeway.”

  “I guess I can die now, then. Everything from now on will just be downhill.”

  He pretended to browse my shelves. “So how’s the book biz?”

  I really didn’t want to talk books with a guy who— you could bet the farm on it—couldn’t care less. “Have a seat,” I said reluctantly, “and tell me what’s on your mind.”

  “Listen to ’im,” he said to some attendant god. “Same old fuckin’ Janeway. No time for bullshit, eh, Cliffie? One of these days they’ll make a movie about your life, old buddy, and that’s what they’ll call it: No Time for Bullshit”

  It was all coming back now, all the stuff I’d always found tedious about Slater. His habit of calling people old buddy. The swagger, the arrogance, the tough-guy front. The false hair on the chest, as some critic— probably Max Eastman—had once said about Hemingway. The glitz, the shoes, the bad taste of wearing animal hides and buying them for his wife. Then bragging about it, as if going deep in hock on a cop’s salary for a $4,000 mink was right up there on a scale with winning the Medal of Honor for bravery. Some of us thought it was poetic justice when the Missus took the mink and a fair piece of Slater’s hide and dumped him for a doctor. But there was still light in the world: now there was Tina.

  “It’s just that I’m pretty sure you didn’t come in here for a book,” I said. “We sold our last issue of Whips and Chains an hour ago.”

  “You kill me, Janeway. Jesus, a guy can’t even stop by for old times’ sake without getting the sarcasm jacked up his ass.”

  “To be brutally honest, you and I never ran with the same crowd.”

  “I always admired you, though. I really did, Janeway. You were the toughest damn cop I ever knew.”

  “I still am,” I said, keeping him at bay.