Do the Weird Crime, Serve the Weird Time

would be called Mystery Classics. He had some has-been guy, D. B. Bowen, author of The Cellophane Fawn Trilogy, on hand to write an intro for five hindered smackers. He would mention the twenty tales one by one and thus give illusion that the new guys ranked up there with Chandler, Borges, Doyle, and so forth. The classics were great from literary to hard-boiled, impressionistic to great logic tales. There was only one rub.

Money.

He didn’t want to do it as a vanity press, no that was evil. He simply needed each of his writers to buy—say —two hundred copies. They could easily sell them to libraries, specialty shops, their friends and relatives. What proud momma wouldn’t buy a book that listed her baby son after Agatha Christie? He would sell the rest.

I know what you are thinking. Well it’s easy to think things like that when fame isn’t around the corner and some guy is telling you that can sell two hundred books.

Belinda and I figured it this way. I could put a display of the books for sake at the store, plus I could take a suitcase full of them to our family reunions, then when the store sold off its used videos at the flea market in the spring I could sell a few more copies then. Before long we could sell our four hundred.

So we coughed up the cash and we wrote out tales. Mine was “The Butcher Wore Red” and hers was “The Video Store Murders.” Nine other people in Pootem likewise coughed up the cash.

The books took a long time to materialize. Since we had never met him in the flesh, we began to wonder if we had been scammed.

When the books did show up, they were as nicely produced as we had imagined for the rather hefty price we had put out. Belinda and I had visualized them as leather bound with gilt lettering and quaint illustrations (at least for the real classics). Greenslau had also asked each of us for a black-and-white photo. I guess he had merely asked for his collection, there weren’t any picture in the book.

Bowen’s introduction was little weird too. He had very perceptive things about the classic tales, but made fun of us. For example, “In Moses Gubb’s ‘The Bucher Wore Red’ we see an interesting attempt to turn a food obsession into a tale of detection. Although the astute reader will have guessed the identity of the killer long before the end of the tale, his obsessive writing will have a special appeal for a certain type of reader interested in the workings of the authorial mind.” Sad to say, mine was not the worst.

But it was a book. It had an ISBN number. It, for the most part, spelled out names right, and it was a hardback, not something easily recycled. It would live on in libraries and bookshelves of our friends.

To my surprise and initial glee, I was listed as the editor. Greenslau had sent a note when everyone’s book was delivered reminding him or her it had been my idea.

The local paper reviewed us. The reviewer liked all the things the dead people had written. It called the editor “only half bad.”

Our relatives did buy copies. But our friends couldn’t afford them. Local specialty shops like Adventures in Crime and Space were willing to buy a couple, but the look of pity in the eyes of the owner didn’t make us feel very good.

You know, nobody buys expensive anthologies at flea markets. But some people did ask us on advice on how to get published. Then I started getting little nasty notes from my fellow authors. They had all laid out nearly three thousand dollars apparently for the purpose of loosing closet space. Nobody blamed Greenslau; everyone remembered that I had thought it up. Your most noble moments may be like the seeds of a dandelion, but e-mail lives forever. (Well at least it did in those uncivilized days).

A year passed. We did our best to sell copies. One of our members a dentist did sell his off to his clients, but he offered them a price break on his services. The few books we gave away as review copies showed up in used bookstores around town, anchors in the cheap bins. I lost my friends in the group. I lost Belinda for other reasons, but when she left me her copies of the book stayed in the garage. Fine. I made a pile of them and propped up a roof beam.

I became guilty. I felt that it was my fault. The least I could do was buy up the cheap copies of the books around town. They usually went for one or two bucks. I made a game of it, wearing dark glasses and pulling a hat over my face, I would go out and bag a few on nights of the new moon.

I don’t know how many copies I had bought before I discovered that there were variant editions of Mystery Classics. One night I opened one up. There were tales by the eleven masters and eleven people I had never heard of. There was an introduction by D. B. Bowen for eleven writers—all of whom lived in Houston, Texas.

So I went out in my garage. The books looked the same on the outside, but close inspection soon reveled that I owned the Santa Fe, Dallas, and Anchorage versions of Mystery Classics. I drove to the copy shop and began shooting copies of the alternate title pages. Each edition had its own editor, some fall guy (or in the case of Anchorage fall gal) that had had the same “brilliant” idea that I had had. I spent all night addressing envelopes. I wanted all the Austin writers to know. To know that I hadn’t done it. To know that somewhere Mr. Greenslau was traveling from town to town raking the dough from would be writers. I had to use snail mail; they wouldn’t take my calls anymore.

At first my fellow writers weren’t concerned. Most of them apologized to me. We talked a little about contacting the other victims, but mainly we were embarrassed. Most of us had had friends that had warned us that the whole thing smelled like a scam, and we were embarrassed. But Belinda changed all that. She set up a mailing list for us all and she wrote a really impassioned letter about how I had been screwed over. She told them that I had paid for her books, and that I had bought all the copies, and that I had taken all their abuse (including hers), and that I had let them know what had happened. She was really mad at Greenslau, and when people realized that I was out over six thousand dollars, they got mad to.

I think it was Dr. Ellison, the dentist, who suggested that we should get our revenge. We agreed early on but we didn’t know how.

Belinda began researching the place that had printed all the books it was in Polk City, Iowa. Other than printing Mystery Classics, they did Bibles in Spanish and menus. Their equipment was old, and the CM line kept them going. They were very friendly, and were glad to give her a list of cities that had had CMs made up. We looked it over. Greenslau had neglected New Orleans. We couldn’t guess why, maybe he thought the bunco squad there was too good. So we got a local ISP and we made a group Crescent City Crime Writers. We got us a webpage, we took out some ads in the New Orleans Picayune, and we mentioned our name on a few mystery news groups. We had people that wanted to join of course, but we told them that we had already filled our meeting space—some unspecified loft on Canal Street and that it would be a while before we were taking members, but they were free to chat. We adopted pseudonyms, we chatted, and we even learned some things about the city of New Orleans and its rich mystery tradition. Eventually someone made the observation that it is sure to easy to get published if you already are published. His name was Reds law. Mr.Redslaw went on to tell us that the reasons dead guys are reprinted is that they sell and you don’t have to pay them.

Therefore, I went on-line as Mr. Phineas Thibodaux, an honest but poor man of the parishes with a great marketing strategy....

Mr. Redslaw thought my notion of an anthology of half classic and half virgin talent was nothing short of genius. He said he could get a has-been writer, a Mr. D. B. Bowen, author of The Cellophane Trilogy, would write an introduction.

Here is where we made our move. We said that we wanted to meet him, Mr. Bowen, of course. We had figured out that much.

At first there was reluctance. Redslaw told us that Bowen was reclusive, alcoholic, etc. We stuck to our guns, and Belinda had a brilliant idea. She researched Bowen. He had written five avant-garde novels in the eighties. The CTT had been marginally successful. He had been on the list of several critics as the young writer to watch. He had speaking tours, was a minor TV celeb, but each novel got stranger and the readership declined. He even tried vanity publishing with—you guessed it—the Menu House in Polk City.

So in addition to our wanting to see him, we began to say good things about his work.

There isn’t the writer alive that doesn’t believe flattery. The entire strange cursed race thinks that someday their scribblings will have a place in god’s eternal bookshelf.