Lost manuscripts, hidden libraries, and antiquarian bookshops with dollops of mystery … Bibliothrillers anyone? PART 4 - The absolute last part ...

This is a sort of a short round-up of some more bibliothrillers whose names I came across while doing a little bit of investigation myself.  This is the sort of ‘research,’ which I call ‘pogo-jumping sniffing research’ on the Internet, where you go from link-alley to link-alley and till you reach some dead-end-page where you lose the scent.  I haven’t read any of these books, but would like to read at least some of these.  All these snippets about these books are compiled from ‘here and there,’ so I wouldn’t call them recommendations, just a descriptive list of some books that are available in what I chose to call ‘bibliothrillers.’

Matthew Pearl, the author of The Poe Shadow (featured in Part 1 of this series!), is one writer who plays around a lot with this genre.  He has written three more books – The Dante Club, The Last Dickens, and The Bookaneers.  From what I read on the Internet, The Dante Club is Pearl’s first novel and here, we have a group of eminent writers in 1885, led by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, that includes Oliver Wendell Holmes and James Russell Lowell.  This group is attempting the first American translation of Dante’s Divine Comedy.  A series of horrific murders of high profile people take place around that time and each murder is modelled on one of the punishments as described in Dante’s Inferno.  This Dante link persuades these writers to turn investigators and solve the murders. 

Charles Dickens is dead and this is 1870.  In The Last Dickens, A struggling publisher in the USA is waiting for the manuscript of The Mystery of Edwin Drood, which turns out to be Dicken’s last novel.  The publisher sends his clerk to get the manuscript, which remains unfinished, the publication of which would save the publishing house’s finances.  The clerk is found dead near the docks and the manuscript is missing.  This prompts a search for the missing last part across continents and all sorts of characters who do not want the last part to be revealed use all methods to stop this search.  Some kind of evil puppet-master is behind all this pulling strings.  In The Last Bookaneer, we see Robert Louis Stevenson, very ill, but struggling to complete his new novel.  The setting is somewhere in the island of Samoa.  The news of the soon-to-be-finished novel reaches ‘the bookaneers,’ literary pirates who steal manuscripts of well-known writers.  Two such literary pirates, adversaries too, fuelled by dreams of making a fortune, embark on a journey and a race to reach the island.    

           

Louis Bayard, who wrote The Pale Blue Eye (in Part 2), too travels around a bit in these parts.  Among the historical fiction that he has written, The School of Night is the one that can be called a bibliothriller.  The plot involves the ‘retrieval’ of a letter by Sir Walter Raleigh in present times that is linked to events that took place in Elizabethan England, almost four hundred years ago.  There is an elite secret group called ‘The School of Night,’ which includes Raleigh, Marlowe, George Chapman, and Thomas Harriot.  This group meets in secret and discusses issues that could not be discussed openly.  I haven’t read any of Bayard’s novels, but after reading about his books, I am definitely intrigued and want to pick up one soon, maybe both.

And a few days ago, I came across the name of Charlie Lovett.  Lovett has written two novels – The Bookman’s Tale and First Impressions.  The Bookman’s Tale is about an American antiquarian bookseller, who leaves his country and settles down in the English countryside after the death of his wife.  While looking at an 18^th century book on Shakespeare, he is intrigued to find a portrait of a woman, who looks remarkably like his wife and he goes digging and reaches the 18^th century and unearths a book that reveals some truths.  First Impressions is about a Jane Austen enthusiast who works in an antiquarian bookshop in London.  An obscure publication, which suddenly interests two different buyers, raises questions about the ‘true authorship’ of Pride and Prejudice.   

And so, here endeth, tentatively and temporarily, this series on bibliothrillers … and in case you, discerning readers of this enchanting blog of mine, have come across, or read, or seen, or heard, about more of the same kind of books, please do leave names of novels and authors at the bottom of this page in the comments section if you please …

Lost manuscripts, hidden libraries, and antiquarian bookshops with dollops of mystery … Bibliothrillers anyone? PART 3

After The Shadow in the Wind, Carlos Ruiz Zafon wrote two more novels, The Angel’s Game, whose English translation came out in 2009, and The Prisoner of Heaven in 2011.  While The Angel’s Game is a prequel to The Shadow in the Wind, The Prisoner of Heaven is the sequel to The Shadow in the Wind.  I saw The Angel’s Game at Hyderabad Airport in 2010 and bought it with ‘great expectations.’  Here we have a young writer in an abandoned mansion in Barcelona churning out sensational novels.  While he uses a pseudonym for these lurid novels, he aspires to be a writer acknowledged for his literary skills.  The mansion has its own hidden secrets and Barcelona provides the backdrop.  The writer’s struggle continues until he receives an offer to write a book ‘with the power to change hearts and minds.’  Of course, you have books, booksellers, publishers, authors, paper, and ink pervading the novel.  While The Shadow of the Wind was fresh and luminous and haunting, this novel appears be doing too much.  It is quite possible that the shadow of The Shadow was too large for this novel to emerge from.  I haven’t read The Prisoner of Heaven yet.  Here, the young boy and girl in The Shadow grow up and get married here and all is well until … one day a mysterious man arrives at their bookshop looking for … a rare copy of a novel by Alexandre Dumas … and then things start moving … or so I read …

The bibliothriller that I read more recently was Robin Sloan’s Mr Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore (2012).  In this book you not only have a curious sounding name of the bookstore, but also ‘familiar’ things like an old bookshop with dusty books on shelves, the enigmatic and laconic Mr Penumbra, who runs the store, and strange customers!  The customers are few and far between, but none of them seem to buy any books.  They do, however, borrow obscure books from the bookstore in consultation with Mr Penumbra.  An out-of-work web-designer takes up the night-shift job at the bookstore and is initially bored by the lack of activity in the bookstore.  As days go by he feels that everything is not as boring and bland as it appears in the bookstore and that something is going on.  He starts paying attention to the customers, the books they borrow, jots down the details, and puts together a sort of pattern.  He wants to know what is going on behind all this blandness.  Is the store a front for something else? He seeks help from his friends and uses their knowledge and skill in computers and software and discovers secrets that go beyond the quiet and dusty interiors of the bookstore!      

Robin Sloan went on to write a prequel to Mr Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore in 2013 named Ajax Penumbra 1969.  I haven’t read this novel so far, but from what I read about it, the novel is the story of Mr Penumbra and how he came to head the 24-hour bookstore.  Again, there appears to be a lost book, which seems to have to power to bestow fortune as well as wreak havoc, and Mr Penumbra has to locate it.  And like the earlier Penumbra novel, there also appears to be elements of modern technology that help in the search for the lost book and maybe more … 

(One more small post on Bibliothrillers and I am done ... promise ... !!)

Lost manuscripts, hidden libraries, and antiquarian bookshops with dollops of mystery … Bibliothrillers anyone? PART 2

Diane Setterfield's The Thirteenth Tale proved to be different sort of thriller.  It is about a best-selling author Vita Winter, who has written a book, Thirteen Tales of Change and Desperation, but it has only twelve stories.  In later editions of the book, the title of the book was amended to just Tales of Change and Desperation, but a few copies of the first edition were printed and the missing tale becomes a tantalising mystery.  A number of biographies are written about her and no two biographies have anything in common about her life.  Winter doesn’t make things any easier by telling different stories about herself to journalists at different times.  Many had attempted to uncover the truth, but failed.  So, her life is a secret and she decides to reveal her secret to an antiquarian bookseller and bookish biographer, Margaret Lea.  Lea had read Winter’s first edition and is intrigued and she too wants to meet Winter to find out about the missing thirteenth tale. 

The Book of Air and Shadows by Michael Gruber is a hunt for an unknown Shakespeare manuscript.  This novel moves between the 17^th century and contemporary times.  Some 17^th century letters, which hint at the existence of an undiscovered play, are discovered in an antiquarian bookshop in New York.  One of the workers makes off with the letters and sells them to a Shakespearean scholar.  Some encrypted letters are thrown into the mix, which when decrypted would help locate the play.  And these letters are held back by the worker.  An intellectual property lawyer joins the hunt when the scholar hands over the letters to him for safekeeping.  The hunt begins.  Of course, there are murders, chases, the mob, kidnappings, international conspiracy, et al.  The 17^th century letters take us back to an imagined Shakespearean world, where the bard himself makes an appearance, and the letters written in ‘Shakespearean’ English lends authenticity to the recreation of that era.      

I tried to locate the other two books for a long time, but I was not successful.  Even now, while The Secret of Lost Things is available (postage charges cancel out the discount!!), The Pale Blue Eye continues to tease with its very high price.  While The Secret of Lost Things is about the discovery of a handwritten lost book by Hermann Melville, in The Pale Blue Eye set in 1830, a cadet named Edgar Allen Poe, a moody poet, helps a police detective investigate a series of murders!  I have been waiting to read these, but sometimes the reading wave goes up and down, and it has been almost ten years now since I first heard of them, but I think I will bite the bullet and buy the anyway, or maybe I will wait out for a while longer while I hopefully scour the streets of Abids. 

Lost manuscripts, hidden libraries, and antiquarian bookshops with dollops of mystery … Bibliothrillers anyone? PART 1

When I picked up Carlos Ruiz Zafon’s The Shadow of the Wind last Sunday at Abids, and when I wrote an account of that book haul in my previous post, it brought back memories of reading The Shadow of the Wind more than ten years ago.  I had bought that book in April 2005.  Shruti and I took turns to read the novel and we liked it a lot.  Since then the novel has gone on to become a sort of cult classic of a sub-genre of crime and mystery fiction which weaves mystery with lost manuscripts, hidden libraries, secret book societies, controversial deaths of authors, antiquarian bookshops, period novels with historical/literary figures, and so on and so forth. 

Remember Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose? Yeah, that is the kind of novel that would delight a reader who finds this sub-genre fascinating.  A dose of Holmesian detection right at the beginning … even the names, Brother William of Baskerville and his student, Adso (Watson), act as a strong allusion to Holmes’ stories … the search for Aristotle’s second book on Poetics, on Comedy … the labyrinthine medieval library … the forbidden books in Finis Africae … the mysterious deaths of monks in a Benedictine monastery … the blind librarian Jorge from Burgos, an allusion to Jorge Luis Borges, who became blind in his later years and was also the librarian of Argentina’s National Library … and the burning library at the end … it is an utterly fascinating read …      

    

Two years after The Shadow of the Wind, I read an article by Pradeep Sebastian in The Hindu ‘Sunday Literary Supplement’ titled ‘Of books inside books,’ which appeared in his regular column Endpaper (on 05 August 2007).  He wrote about this kind of mystery novels and called them ‘bookish thrillers’ … “Books are the actual protagonists in these thrillers. Not books about books, but books inside books. In this genre, librarians, bookstore clerks, collectors, and even readers (you and I) come off looking brilliant and sexy!” The Shadow of the Wind, he says, galvanized and expanded the boundaries of the genre and brought the genre into prominence.  I was pleased that I had read the novel.  In that article Pradeep Sebastian talks about 6 novels that he considered coming under the ‘bookish thrillers’ genre – Jed Rubenfeld’s The Interpretation of Murder, Matthew Pearl’s The Poe Shadow, Diane Setterfield’s The Thirteenth Tale; Michael Gruber’s The Book of Air and Shadow, Louis Bayard’s The Pale Blue Eye, and Sheridan Hay’s The Secret of Lost Things.

My interest was aroused and I wanted to read all these 6 novels and searched bookshops in Hyderabad, but couldn’t find a single novel from this list.  I was not comfortable with online shopping because I was terribly scared of using my debit card for online purchases, but I had to try.  At that time Indiaplaza was a leading online bookstore in India.  I visited the site and saw that they had four of these 6 books.  The way I shopped online was a tedious affair as I look back now.  I placed the order, then wrote out a cheque, sent it by courier, waited for the cheque to be ‘realised,’ and then the books would be dispatched and delivered.  It took around 15 days for the whole process.  The Interpretation of Murder, The Poe Shadow, The Thirteenth Tale; and The Book of Air and Shadow were delivered and I started reading them one by one.  Each novel was different and offered differing thrills. 

The Interpretation of Murder ties in Freud’s actual visit to New York 1909 to a fictional murder that tests his skills.  Freud starts applying his theories to try and recover the memory of one of the survivors.  But it is not as easy because there is a lot of interference.  New York itself becomes a character, the dark places of the city resembling the dark recesses of the human mind that Freud attempts to access in order to solve the murder.  

I remember picking up Mathew Pearl’s The Poe Shadow to read next.  An ardent admirer of Poe, Quentin Clark, embarks on a crusade to find out the truth behind Poe’s death.  In trying to uncover this mystery, Clark finds himself confronted with ‘international political agents, a female assassin, slave trade, and lost secrets of Poe’s final hours.’  For some reason, it turned out to be a tedious read for me and it took me three months to finish reading it and by that time, I had lost lots of links in between and somehow stumbled across the finishing line.  I don’t know why it happened, maybe because I didn’t know much about Poe.  Now, I feel I should revisit the book and read it again.

Abids on Sunday after 6 months …

So, I set out to hunt books at Abids on Sunday after a gap of almost 6 months.  During these 6 months, the thought of going to Abids occurred several times, but most of the times it was the ‘spirit willing, flesh weak’ syndrome that made me stay put at home, and other times there was something or the other at home that required my presence or attention.  Vinod had also enquired why I had not been Abid-ing all these days.  This time, Shruti also pushed me into going to Abids.  And so, I went this last Sunday to Abids to hunt books and to meet Vinod, Umashankar, and Srikanth. 

I reached at around 11 o’ clock and rang up Vinod, and I got a ‘switched off’ message.  I started wondering and then stopped wondering.  There was a heap of books where I was standing and I dove in.  In the same place earlier, the heap used to be very small, but now there were lots of books.  There were many that I wanted to buy, but hesitated and continued looking.  I found an Adam Dalgliesh mystery by P D James.  I haven’t read any Adam Dalgliesh mystery so far and not because of lack of opportunities.  You’ll finds lots of P D James at Abids on any given Sunday.  So, let me make a beginning I thought and picked up Original Sin.  

I then saw a good copy of Carlos Ruiz Zafon’s The Shadow of the Wind.  I had read this novel earlier in 2005 when it was released in India.  Anyway, I had thoroughly enjoyed reading it.  The novel belongs to a sub-genre of crime fiction which is now being called ‘Bibliomysteries.’  The Shadow of the Wind is set in Spain and begins with the ‘Cemetery of Forgotten Books,’ hidden in the heart of the old city of Barcelona.  This was a good copy and I didn’t have the heart to leave it behind.  Vinod usually picks up good copies of novels that he already has and read, and gifts them to his friends.  I had emulated this ‘good habit’ earlier and had gifted a couple of ‘Abids’ books to a student of mine.  I picked The Shadow of the Wind and hope to find an interested reader for this! 

  

Then I saw a Peter Robinson novel.  Peter Robinson’s Inspector Banks novels are a favourite of mine, more so because I had picked up a couple of Inspector Banks novels on a hunch at a Best Books sale a couple of years ago and found them to be really good.  So, Peter Robinson was ‘my discovery.’  And happily enough, the Peter Robinson novel that I saw and picked up turned out to be an ‘omnibus,’ two novels in one volume – Dry Bones that Dream and The Hanging Valley.  I quickly scanned my memory bank to check if I had already read these titles.  The results were hazy, and there was still a chance that I hadn’t read these two titles.  It is quite possible I thought, that I had read some other police procedural novel, possibly Ian Rankin’s, which also had ‘hanging’ or ‘bones’ in the title.  Either way, no loss I thought, if not, I could always gift it away. 

I paid for the three books (Rs.80!) and put them in my bag.  I then turned around to check the smaller pile, and lo and behold (!), I saw Vinod, Uma, and Srikanth, walking towards the same stall.  After all the ‘hi-s’ and ‘hello-s,’ I told Vinod that I had received a ‘switched off’ message when I had called him.  He said he had changed his number now that he is in Nalagonda.  This was news to me.  He said he had gone back to his earlier department and now transferred to Nalagonda.  Uma and Srikanth were searching among the pile of books and each found a different edition of the well-known chef Anthony Bourdain’s book.  I think it was Kitchen Confidential, I am not sure though.  I continued my search in the smaller pile and picked up a book I felt I had read about and I am sure it was in the news when it came out – A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian by Marina Lewycka.  The title itself was intriguing enough and the blurbs all over the front and back and inside told me that the novel had won a couple of prizes (Bollinger Everyman and SAGA) and was longlisted (Booker) and shortlisted (Orange), and that it has been translated into 27 languages.  There were lots of excerpts from reviews and the most common adjective used, among the many, to describe it was, ‘funny.’  That sort of settled the matter for me.  

I saw another book with an arresting green, black, and red cover with an outline (silhouette!) of a donkey in the centre.  I had never heard of the author (Patricia Lynch) or the title (The Turf-Cutter’s Donkey) before.  A small blurb on the back cover informed me that this story is a classic of children’s literature and ‘remains one of the most magical and exciting of Irish fantasies’ and also that it was ‘for readers aged 8-12.’  Mamoon is seven now and she would be ready to be able to read it in a couple of years’ time.  I picked it up for Mamoon’s fledgling library, but I will read it too. 

I had got 5 books from one stall, and that too the first stall I visited.  I was sated and happy.  We all trooped into the nearest Irani and in between slurps of chai and bites of biscuit, we talked about books and films, with the Marathi film, Sairat, dominating the conversation.  We then trooped out and continued with our hunt.  My bag was full and I was too satisfied to carry on.  But carry on I did and did the whole round and somewhere I lost the other three.  I remembered that Shruti had asked me to pick up a few colouring and art books for Mamoon.  I found a seller with a whole heap of such books and bought around 10 books for Mamoon.  

On my way back, I saw Uma and Srikanth walking towards me and asked me if I had seen Vinod.  I told them I saw his head somewhere and by the time I reached the spot, he had disappeared and that he was probably engulfed by the books.  They moved on and I moved on.

I felt that some of the usual booksellers were absent and there were quite a few empty places on the pavement.  The weather alternated between cloudy and slightly warm, and maybe the threat of rain could have forced some of the sellers to not put up their wares that day.  It was nearing 1 o’ clock and time to leave.  When I reached home, the first thing I did was to check the two Peter Robinson titles.  I was pleased to know that I hadn’t read these two novels and proceeded to read them without further delay on Sunday itself.  And yesterday night, I finished them!!