The Burglar Who Met Fredric Brown

6

Pricing the books I’d brought from Mowgli could wait until I had the computer’s help to determine what prices other sellers were asking. With most books I’m willing to wing it, relying on my experience and general feel for the business, but collectible crime fiction is one of the more volatile areas, and I was in no mad rush to get the books on my shelves.

The first step was to transfer the tote bag to my back room, and even that had to wait because of the way customers kept demanding my attention. One, an older woman with a haunted look about her, bought three Jeffrey Farnol novels that had been on my shelf as long as I’d owned the store. Farnol was an English writer who produced a period romance novel annually for over forty years until his death in 1952. If Georgette Heyer was the mother of the Regency Romance, he could claim to have fathered it — but I can’t keep Heyer in stock, while I’d acquired four Farnol novels along with the keys to Barnegat Books, and in all the intervening years I’d sold just one.

“Adam Penfeather, Buccaneer,” I said, as I took my customer’s money and counted out her change. “And don’t ask me why I remember the title.”

She didn’t. “A wonderful book,” she said with feeling. “Donkey’s years since I’ve read it. Now that you’ve mentioned it, I think it may be time for me to read it again.” She smiled, patted the bag of books she’d just bought. “But first...”

I wished her happy reading. Oh, it would be exactly that, she said, beaming.

Her place at the counter was quickly taken by a man who’d somehow managed to find six books on my bargain table that he wanted to own. I took a twenty-dollar bill from him and wished him well, and then a young man with a gold and green John Deere baseball cap noticed The Screaming Mimi paperback on my counter and asked if I had a hardcover copy, and I said I didn’t but pointed him to the other Fredric Brown novels, and, well, eventually there was enough of a lull so that I got away from the counter, Mowgli’s books in tow, and stowed them in the back room.

And then my John Deere fan was back. He hadn’t found anything he needed by Brown, but he’d noticed a couple of books by Dennis Lehane, and they weren’t ones he needed, but did I happen to have Darkness, Take My Hand? That was Lehane’s second book, and of course he’d read it, and it wasn’t supposed to be as scarce as A Drink Before the War, but God knows he’d searched hard and couldn’t find it, and—

“Wait right here,” I said, and made a quick trip to my back room. “It just came in,” I said, “and I haven’t had time to price it. I’ll probably do that tonight, if you wanted to come back tomorrow. Or if you want it now, how’s fifty dollars?”

I guess my price must have been low. He had his Visa card out of his wallet before I’d finished my sentence.

I’d look it up afterward, I thought, and find out just how far below market I was. But what did it matter? When I’d calculated what to pay Mowgli, the Lehane was one of a batch I’d pegged at five dollars apiece, and I’d turned it over in less than an hour for ten times that.

And what had Mowgli paid for it? Fifty cents? A dollar? He’d picked it up from the Salvation Army at a thrift-shop price, so he was well ahead of the game, and they got it and everything else for nothing, as a donation, so this looked to me like a win all around.

“If you think I won’t find romance in the Salvation Army...”

But why, I wondered, had my customer had so much trouble finding the book? Was he spending too much time on his tractor? Had he lost track of one of the miracles of the modern age, that anyone could find any book in no time at all?

If a book existed, you could turn up a copy in five minutes. And if it didn’t exist, well, then it might take you all of ten. Dreaming of one of the famous books forever lost to time, like Homer’s Margites or Shakespeare’s Cardenio? How about The Isle of the Cross, by Herman Melville, or maybe Thomas Hardy’s The Poor Man and the Lady? Boot up your computer, get online, check ABE Books. No luck there? Well, don’t stop now. Check eBay, why don’t you?

“What’s that, Bernie? Pig Latin?”