Christopher Morley’s The Haunted Bookshop begins with the mysterious disappearance from the Bookshop’s shelves of Thomas Carlyle’s biography of Oliver Cromwell, that bringer of the reign of Christian righteousness and short hair to a people who, after a taste of perfection and a lot of death, decided they preferred neither. The book disappears, reappears, disappears, reappears. Bookshop owner Mifflin is mildly puzzled by these events.
Young Aubrey Gilbert, however, senses aquiver with newfound love for Mifflin’s young assistant, Titania Chapman, finds them sinister indeed. Especially after he finds the cover of the book in a German delicatessen’s book-rack, makes enquiries of the owner, and is nearly thrown off the Brooklyn Bridge for his curiosity.
His love for Titania exacerbated by concern for her safety in this suddenly lethal world of books, Aubrey moves into a room across from the Bookshop. He begins to peer and pry, and his peering reveals strange comings and goings by unidentifiable people. The plot thickens with the Brooklyn fog.
I won’t keep you in suspense, though Morley does. The Cromwell biography has been stolen by a diabolical German agent, Weintraub, masquerading as a mild-mannered Brooklyn butcher. Weintraub has stolen the book to use as a vehicle for a bomb intended to blow up Woodrow Wilson and thereby derail the Versailles negotiations which will bring about world peace and justice and the end to war and all that. Dommage!
Fortunately for world peace, etc., young Aubrey stays on the case, and in the nick of time confronts Weintraub’s evil henchman in the Bookshop, causing the accursed Kraut to blow himself and several shelves of books to Kingdom Come.
Titania, needless to say, is spared to experience extreme gratitude, which is shared by her Rich Father, and all live happily, etc.
What interested me most about this plot was how closely it resembled a subplot in Dunning’s Booked to Die: a decent man is driven to extremes of violence by the evil of his antagonist, that evil being illustrated unequivocally by the antagonist’s violent treatment of women.
“’You blasted Hun,’” Aubrey grunts during the final confrontation in the Bookshop, “’Go wrestling with a girl, will you?’”
Well, that does it. Any amount of carnage can be justified then.
And so, in this idealistic paean to the power of the printed word, the beauty that is truth and the truth that is beauty, the plot is resolved by an explosion which kills the evil bomber and spares the innocent (except for Mifflin’s dog, whose heroic demise drives home the justice of the violence).
And so, searching for surcease from the violence of our times, you wind up encountering just another example of it.
“The Christian quick trip from love to hate and murder is our principle entertainment,” Kurt Vonnegut once observed. “We might call it ‘Christianity Fails Again,’ and how satisfying so many of us have been trained to find it when it fails and fails.”
Indeed.
