In John Dunning’s Booked to Die, men abuse and murder women and each other, brothers and sisters cordially loathe each other; Cliff Janeway, book-loving cop protagonist, beats his antagonist nearly to death – justifiably, of course, for the antagonist is a bully who likes to beat up women. Just another few days in America, full of the violence we take to be the norm.
Christopher Morley’s The Haunted Bookshop, a bibliomystery first published in 1919, is filled with the innocent pleasures and fervent idealism we older folk like to think prevailed, once upon a time in America. The Bookshop, whose air is “heavy with the delightful fragrance of mellowed paper and leather surcharged with a strong bouquet of tobacco,” occupies a fictitious “Gissing Street” in a Brooklyn – “that borough of superb sunsets and magnificent vistas of husband-propelled baby-carriages” – that seems equally fictitious to us who know Brooklyn through Scorsese’s and Andrew Vachss’s eyes.
Into this Arcadian Brooklyn comes Aubrey Gilbert, hoping to persuade the Bookshop’s owner, Roger Mifflin, to buy some advertising. He fails, but meets the spunky but innocent (need it be said) Titania Chapman, whose rich father has sent her to work there for some seasoning in the real world of commerce. Aubrey is “smitten.”
Shortly, the plot causes him to surprise Titania in her nightie; both are aghast; she retreats; he dithers; she reappears “in her customary garb. She sat down on the landing. Aubrey felt that everything was as bad as it could possibly be.”
I try to imagine one of my twenty-year-old students reading this scene without the aid of an interpreter. He was all, like, you know, embarrassed behind seeing her ankles.
In addition to young love’s blushes and fidgets, The Haunted Bookshop overflows with Morley’s unabashedly romantic love affair with books, which affair endured throughout his long life. “You see, books are the answer to all our perplexities,” Mifflin writes to his brother-in-law. “They are the one stainless and unimpeachable achievement of the human race.”
In such an idealist, WWI has produced great anguish, but the idealism surmounts it: “’ Do you know why people are reading more books now than ever before?’” Mifflin asks Aubrey. “’Because the terrific catastrophe of the war has made them realize that their minds are ill.’” The bookseller in his shop becomes the equivalent of the heroic physician: “’A doctor is advertised by the bodies he cures. My business is advertised by the minds I stimulate….I can see just by looking at you that your mind is ill for lack of books but you are blissfully unaware of it!’”
So – plenty of innocence, plenty of idealism…just the thing for a reader who wants to revisit a time when impassioned argument didn’t automatically involve the use of a Sig-Sauer and the blossoming of love deplete the world’s supply of K-Y jelly and restraint devices.
Of course, you might notice I haven’t talked much about the plot. Because, when you look at the plot that makes this an early bibliomystery, what you find is something a little different, a little less innocent or idealistic, a little more familiar.
