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
BOOKMAN’S WAKE
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
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 1968— 73, 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
