After all the serendipities … a little bit more … meet a budding antiquarian book collector …

While that serendipitous Sunday ended with ‘absolute clarity,’ I was also aware that with absolute clarity comes absolute responsibility … yeah … and so, feeling all responsible, I went to my shopping cart … I had the three Hari Majestic novels, I had The Book Hunters of Katpadi … I also had Umberto Eco’s Chronicles of a Liquid Society … it was simple actually … I would go for all these books as these were the ones that grabbed my attention through those reviews and articles …

But as it turned out finally, things changed mid-way and I ended up not buying the Hari Majestic novels this time  … though expensive, I felt strongly about Umberto Eco’s Chronicles of a Liquid Society … this being his last book and so I decided to buy it … and I realized I was on an Eco trip when I started browsing other essay collections by Eco … I was interested in Faith in Fakes: Travels in Hyper-reality and Inventing the Enemy: Essays on Everything,  but settled for Faith in Fakes … this was an unanticipated buy and out went responsible buying …

While browsing books by Eco, for no reason at all, amazon kept ‘recommending’ other sort of ‘similar’ books … Patrick Suskind’s The Pigeon kept flying across my face much too often … his earlier novel Perfume was intriguing and outstanding … I had read the novel, and was fascinated … and also saw the movie based on it … so, the author was ‘tried and tested’ … I said yes to The Pigeon … feeling less and less responsible now …

The Book Hunters of Katpadi?  This book I wanted to buy and read … desperately, actually … as I wrote in my previous post, “… somewhere I knew that if at all anybody wrote a bibliomystery in India in English, it would be Pradeep Sebastian” … it was as if I was waiting for this book even before it was written … 

After the books arrived, I read a couple of essays in Chronicles of a Liquid Society and before long I was away for five days … visited Mangalore and Shimoga last week, actually … after I returned I picked up The Book Hunters of Katpadi … I am reading it very very slowly … mystery apart, it is a treat for those who are passionate about collecting books and making books (book making?) … all about antiquarian books, sellers, rivalries between collectors, papers, letter press, founts, binding … I have crossed a hundred pages and I can say that beneath the mystery flows a narrative of book collecting and books making in India …

But what warmed my heart was this passage right at the beginning … this is narrated by Kayal, the young associate of Neela, the owner of Biblio in Chennai, India’s first full-fledged antiquarian bookshop … Kayal is putting together a catalogue of modern Indian first editions and working out the tricky business of identifying them and then this comes as an example …

As I came to the bottom of the page, I rushed to my bookshelf and pulled out … very very gently … my Rupa paperback copy of English, August … I had read this novel many many times, lent it to friends and now I was wondering if the copy I had was the 1988 edition … I opened the copyrights page and saw the year … and it is …. yesss …. it is 1988!!!

I am already getting this heady feeling that I am a bona fide antiquarian book collector …

Serendipities on a Sunday …

Last Sunday’s (18 February 2017) The Hindu Literary Review was enveloped in a cloud of mystery.  And along the way, mystery met serendipity …

The Hindu Literary Review has always been a favourite and on the Sundays that they arrive, I usually end up with a book wish-list.  But it is not always that the wish-list is fulfilled, sometimes I lose interest, sometimes I feel I should wait for some more time, and so the books in the list gets scattered.  Some survive and move from wish list to cart.  And from cart to home takes some more time. 

And so, my cart on amazon always has some books waiting for the click.  I am just waiting for the right moment and then it is all systems go … go … go … yeah, buying books is like a military operation.  So, on Sunday, I open the Literary Review and the bottom of the first page carried a review of Zac O’Yeah’s Tropical Detective: A Hari Majestic Mystery.  I liked this … waah, review of crime fiction!  This is the third in Zac O’Yeah’s Hari Detective series.  I had always wanted to read the first and the second, but somehow missed them.  The reviews and feedback have all been good for these two.  And recently I saw that the third in the series is also released and with great fanfare, I dropped all three in my shopping cart.  I’ll buy all three in one go, I thought.  And there they were, all in the cart and this review appears.  I get this serendipitous nudge.  No more delay-dalaying I thought more strongly. 

I then flip to the last page and see this article Stout and shad roe: Nero Wolfe – a detective who loves his grub.  Nero Wolfe … hmmm … haven’t heard this name before.  The article was about this detective created by Rex Stout, who loved his grub and had a personal gourmet chef in his house.  He is enormously fat and never leaves his house.  After reading this piece, I was not only hungry for breakfast, but also hungry to read Nero Wolfe’s stories.  So, another crime fiction article, eh … not bad.

I turn the page and go to page 2.  Is that a review of Pradeep Sebastian’s book?  He usually writes about rare books, book making, book-collecting and so on, on these same pages.  He has written a book?  The last time he came out with a book, The Groaning Shelf, it was a treasure for book collectors and antiquarians, and I absolutely loved it.  And this book under review?  Waah … it is a bibliomystery – The Book Hunters of Katpadi!!  I don’t know what this feeling is called, but somewhere I knew that if at all anybody wrote a bibliomystery in India in English, it would be Pradeep Sebastian.  I felt happy and pleased that my private prediction had come true.  This one I had to read. 

Three articles about mystery books?  I went to the first page to see if this is a mystery fiction special supplement or what … no, it was not that … just coincidence.  I go to page 3 and there staring at me is a review with the title Birbal meets Father Brown.  This is too much ya.  It is a book called The Tree Bears Witness: A Birbal Mystery by Sharath Komarraju.  Detective Birbal?  The review says the book promises some good Mughal murder, mystery, and sleuthing. 

Not bad … four mystery reviews … Tropical Detective and The Book Hunters of Katpadi pucca buying only …

I felt as I had eaten a hearty breakfast.  I went out and bought my regular weeklies – Outlook, India Today, and The Week.  Took up Outlook and started from the last page, and on the book review pages, I see this review of Umberto Eco’s Chronicles of a Liquid Society.  It made me feel excited.  I have read and immensely enjoyed Eco’s novels and essays, and I was saddened by his passing away in February 2016.  At that time there was a faint rumour that a collection of his essays would be forthcoming and I have been keeping a diligent watch.  Some months ago I saw Chronicles of a Liquid Society on amazon and was elated.  I didn’t buy the book immediately, I thought I’d wait for the paperback.  Yeah, the hardback being sold was expensive.  I knew that I would buy the book eventually.  The reviewer (Shobhit Mahajan) says that as a bibliophile, Eco has a number of essays on books and there was a reference to Nero Wolfe, the gourmet detective.  There is a ‘fascinating’ essay on Nero Wolfe, Mahajan says, for which Eco spent two months rereading all the eighty Nero Wolfe stories!  Nero Wolfe again! Twice in the same day!  This was certainly a serendipitous moment for me … now my curiosity was piqued.  I had to read Eco’s book and also Nero Wolfe’s stories.  Eco’s book would come in a bit later, but in the meantime I found the first Nero Wolfe novel floating in cyber-world as an e-book and started reading it.  All this is happening on the same Sunday. 

I open India Today in the afternoon, and start from the last page as usual.  And in the book reviews, I see a review of Pradeep Sebastian’s The Book Hunters of Katpadi!  Waah re waah … what serendipity!  Some great biblio-force was putting these links on my reading path that Sunday.  After that there was no doubt or hesitation in my mind … can’t ignore all these connections happening on the same day.  Then there was this absolute clarity.

A chota crime fiction haul from www.secondhandbooksindia.com

I haven’t been able to visit Abids for more than a month now and am missing all those secondhand books … whether I buy books there or not, going there and meeting friends and wandering head-bent along those book-laden roads is itself a thrill … anyway, not that I was missing books or reading … I had bought some travelogues online and was reading them (will do a post about them soon) … I was also catching up with those Ross Macdonald novels that I had purchased earlier … and I used to check www.secondhandbooksindia.com regularly … and a week back something turned up at this site … a Ross Macdonald novel, The Galton Case … and another John D. MacDonald novel, One Fearful Yellow Eye, which I didn’t have, was already on display for quite some time now on the site … and I also saw that two novels by Simon Brett had surfaced … I selected one of the Brett novels … a ‘Charles Paris’ novel … Situation Tragedy …

Read The Galton Case already and couldn’t help laughing at the line that a poet chap, Chad Bolling, throws in the novel … You can’t make a Hamlet without breaking egos … too good!!

Two tea-travel-book posts … that became an article in www.springmagazine.net - an online journal for students of English Literature …

Whenever I link my blogposts on Facebook, I get some kind of response … I get ‘like’-s and sometimes also comments … I do look forward to these responses … and there are some of my friends who support me almost always by ‘liking’ my posts and by sometimes by buoying me up through comments … Shubha, my cousin, is one such supporter … and KBS Krishna is another, especially after I started writing about my encounters with crime fiction, more so with my recent obsession with ‘hardboiled’ detective fiction (all those Macdonald posts!!) …  Krishna was my contemporary at CIEFL and if I am not wrong, belonged to the first ever batch of MA students … now he teaches at the Central University of Himachal Pradesh … we got chatting after some time about crime fiction and it was then that he told that he worked on ‘hardboiled’ detective fiction for his PhD … aaha …

Anyway … so, one day he asked me if he could use my posts for an online magazine that he was planning … this was the first time somebody was asking permission to use my posts … I was curious and asked him for details … he wanted an article that he was planning to put under the title ‘closet classics,’ books that should have been widely known, but have remained hidden for various reasons … he seemed to like my posts on travel books on my blog … and wanted to merge two reviews that had similar themes (sort of…) and make one article … So, Krishna took my posts on Bishwanath Ghosh’s ‘Chai, Chai’ and Rishad Saam Mehta’s Hot Tea Across India and did some editing and all that and also gave a title, Wake up and Smell the Tea, to the merged article …

And this article appears in the first issue of Spring Magazine on English Literature … when I saw the link for the magazine in my mail, I was happy that finally something came out of my blog after all these years of writing … ha ha ha … and when I read the contents of the first issue, I was really pleased … Krishna, as the Editor-in-Chief, has brought out a magazine that puts English literature in the hands of students and young researchers … a literature magazine that doesn’t scare away students … a non-intimidating student-friendly magazine … my sincere hope is that the Spring Magazine stays this way for many more years to come … and friends, please pass the word around … this magazine deserves a wider audience … and thanks Krishna for liking my tea book posts …

Haan … this is the chai article … Wake up and Smell the Tea  by yours truly ... 

Looking for Ross Macdonald and finding John D. MacDonald ... the first packet of JDM novels arrives – Part 2

Both writers were born one year apart and were contemporaries, and passed away within three years of each other.  In fact, Ross Macdonald, whose real name is Kenneth Millar, experimented with various pseudonyms.

“For his fifth novel, in 1949, he wrote under the name John Macdonald, in order to avoid confusion with his wife, who was achieving her own success writing as Margaret Millar. He then changed his pen name briefly to John Ross Macdonald, before settling on Ross Macdonald, in order to avoid being confused with fellow mystery writer John D. MacDonald, who wrote under his real name.”

So, there is a connection after all … good … now, to move further … is John D. MacDonald a prolific writer? Oh god, yes … ‘prolific’ describes him … around 75 novels and 5 short story collections … awesome, na … (trying to use new lingo!!) … John D. MacDonald too comes under the ‘hardboiled’ mystery writers’ category like Chandler, Hammett, and Ross Macdonald … these are all ‘hard-boiled’ writers … tough cookies, eh … John D. MacDonald too has his own favourite gumshoe, and wrote 21 novels featuring Travis McGee, an “intelligent and introspective” man, with a “hard cynical streak.”  He is a “salvage consultant” and “knight-errant.” “McGee made his living by recovering the loot from thefts and swindles, keeping half to finance his "retirement," which he took in pieces as he went along.” 

(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_D._MacDonald)

And ... this is how John D. MacDonald looked like ... 

Ah, yes … it was his novel The Executioners, which was made into the movie Cape Fear, in 1962, with Gregory Peck, and it was remade in 1991 by Martin Scorsese …

All these decided me … I went back to the secondhand books site and checked the available titles against the Trevor McGee list … 5 titles … and one collection of John D. MacDonald’s early mystery stories … great … the price ranged from Rs.75 to Rs.90 per title … not bad at all … I tried not to compare the prices with ‘what if I had got these at Abids’ prices … tch tch ... bad habit only ... 

And I received these 6 titles by John D. MacDonald yesterday (24th July 2015).

This is the first in the Travis McGee series ... written in 1964 ... this one is a 1984 reprint ... I am happy and relieved that I got the first one in the series ... 

Darker than Amber is the seventh in the Travis McGee series and was published in 1966 ... and ha ha ha ... can you believe this?  This copy I got is the first edition ... ha ha ha ... 

Published in 1970, The Long Lavender Look is the 12th in the series ... 

This one is the 15th in the series ... and was published in 1973 ... 

Cinnamon Skin was published in 1982 and is the 20th in the Travis McGee series ...

Did you notice something?  Each title has a 'colour' word ... unless you see four or five at a time, you wouldn't notice this ... this colour word, suggested by John MacDonald's publisher was supposed to act like a mnemonic device for the readers “...so that when harried travelers in airports looked to buy a book, they could at once see those MacDonald titles they had not yet read.” 

And The Good Old Stuff is really the icing on the cake as far this collection is concerned for me ... this is like aged malt or something like that ... this book contains 13 stories of his pre-Travis McGee years ... these stories were published between 1947 and 1952 in magazines like Detective Tales, New Detective Magazine, Doc Savage Magazine, Dime Detective, Mystery Book Magazine, and others ... this edition has an introduction by Francis M. Nevins, Jr. and a foreword by John D. MacDonald ... 

I strongly feel I should begin with this good old stuff ...  

Looking for Ross Macdonald and finding John D. MacDonald … both 'hard-boiled' crime fiction writers – Part I

After tea and biscuits (on the same Sunday as in the previous post), as Vinod and I came out of the Irani, Vinod asked me if I had read anything by Ross Macdonald.  This was a new name to me and I said no, I hadn’t.  Vinod then told me that Ross Macdonald was writing around the same time as Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett and they were considered the ‘holy trinity’ of crime fiction in America.  He told me that Ross Macdonald too had a ‘detective’ of his own called Lew Archer, who was a ‘tough, but humane’ detective.  Vinod says in one of his posts that had had no idea about this writer till he read The Wycherly Woman, which he found in Abids in March this year and then in June he found three more by Ross Macdonald.  And since then he has been hooked.  And he asked me not to miss any book by Ross Macdonald, especially if one has enjoyed reading Chandler and Hammett.  Ross Macdonald also has a similar style in terms of writing sharp dialogues.  So, one more name was added to my list of ‘must-read’ writers.

And though I looked carefully, I didn’t find any Ross Macdonald novels that day at Abids.  Back home, as is the norm, I googled and then Wikipedia-ed 'Ross Macdonald' (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ross_Macdonald) and got to know quite a bit about him and his novels.  According to the entry in Wikipedia, “Macdonald has been called the primary heir to Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler as the master of American hardboiled mysteries.”  This is how Ross Macdonald looked ...

Fedora and all ... 'private-eye' written all over ... 

mmm … sounds exciting, I thought … I checked online stores and found the prices too heavy for my wallet … I then wondered if that Indian online second-hand bookstore that I have been visiting on and off (with no great success till now), would have any Ross Macdonald books … well, I went there and looked for books by Ross Macdonald and found not a single book … total deflation … I tried ‘Macdonald’ only and that search came up with a number of books by one John D. MacDonald … but the only familiar title among these was ‘Cape Fear’ … I remembered it by the name of the film … same book made into a film?  If so, he must be a well-known and good writer … back to Wikipedia again to check out this ‘MacDonald’ … 

N. S. Madhavan’s Litanies of Dutch Battery … the other book I got at Sangeet along with the Becks on the same day …

As soon as I saw this book, the cover caught my attention first, then I saw the name of the author … at first I thought it was Khushwant Singh!  Then I saw that the actual author’s name was almost hidden among the leaves and clouds at the top … anyway, that fact was established … I had heard N. S. Madhavan’s name long back in connection with his well-known short story Higuita … a friend and fellow-researcher at CIEFL, M T Ansari had written a paper on the author and this short story ... this piqued my interest in the story and I had read the story in English translation then … and so when I saw the author’s name, I picked up the book … something lit up dimly in the dark recesses of my memory, which told me that I had either read a review or some reference to this novel … not a strong enough vibe to remember anything clearly … I felt I should buy this book … then there was a longish blurb by Khushwant Singh on the opening page, a part of which appears on the cover … at the back there were some more positive comments … and if I want to know more, then Wikipedia is always there for initial information … and this is what I got to know … Madhavan primarily writes short stories in Malayalam and has published five collections of short stories, all highly acclaimed, with Higuita being judged the best short story in hundred years of Malayalam literature … and Litanies of Dutch Battery written in 2003 (Lanthan Batheriyile Luthiniyakal) is his first and only novel so far … this novel was translated into English in 2010 …

And “the novel is about life on an imaginary island in the Kochi backwater, named after a 17th-century battery (bathery in Malayalam) of five cannons installed on its promontory by the Dutch (Lanthans in Malayalam). Jessica, the young narrator of the story, is the scion of a family of carpenters with a long tradition of boat building. Her remniscences start from the days when she was inside her pregnant mother's womb. The novel presents an intimate picture of life of the Latin Christians of the Kerala coast, descendants of poor, low-caste Hindus who were converted to Christianity by Portuguese colonists in the 16th century.”

4 novels from the Martin Beck Series - Book haul near Sangeet, Secunderabad

Despite wanting to visit Abids on Sunday for months now, to look for second hand books and to meet Vinod and friends, I couldn’t go for so many reasons … and unable to bear the desperation, I decided to visit the second hand book stall near Sangeet last Tuesday which is open all through the week … and see if I could satisfy my second hand book cravings … I have passed the book stall on Sangeet road many a times recently while going elsewhere in the car and always looked longingly at the stall as it fleeted past … at one point of time when Sangeet was still a movie theatre and this book stall was housed in the nearby building, I was a frequent visitor and have bought many books worth remembering and cherishing … now the book stall has ‘come to the road side,’ and I still visit it, but the pickings have become less and less as numbers dwindled and range narrowed and became predictable …

There was some difference this time … the stall looked healthier and I saw more hard-bound coffee table books on the far side … there were more books, it looked like … apart from the shelves inside the temporary roofing, there were a couple of tables in the open ‘under the permanent roofing’ with books arranged neatly on them … the book-laden tables looked inviting … but there was a warning sign … the price sign … which said ‘Any book Rs. 100’ … that was helpful actually … the search would now be slow and careful …

Lots of good books on the tables … some of them I had and had read … some of them I wanted to read … I browsed and browsed … made two rounds … something caught my attention … I thought I’d come back for a third round and check and then went inside … the collection inside was predictable … didn’t find anything interesting … finished that part quickly and then came to the tables … at the farthest end were stacked around five books that looked like a set … picked them up and saw that they were books of the Martin Beck series by Maj Sjowall and Per Wahloo … I remember having bought a book by the same authors a couple of years ago, but the name eluded me … I’d go home and check …

At that time I had read about the authors and discovered that the authors, Maj Sjowall and Per Wahloo, were Swedish and were married to each other and that they wrote ten crime novels with Martin Beck as the detective … these ten novels were written between 1965 and 1975 … the authors planned to write only ten novels and this Decalogue was subtitled ‘The Story of a Crime’ …

To get back to the table … there were five novels in the set and one was a double, so there were four Martin Beck books on offer … I thought … hesitated … and then re-thought … and then, ‘what the heck,’ I told myself and picked up the four novels … The Laughing Policeman, The Abominable Man, The Locked Room, and The Terrorists … the books were also conveniently numbered according to their order in the series … 4, 7, 8, and 10 …

After I bought the books, I noticed that this particular series was in many ways unique … there were a lot of extras in each book … for instance, The Laughing Policeman had an introduction by Sean and Nicci French, another crime-writer pair, and an essay inside by Richard Shepard, and an interview, and other articles, and information about the authors … so, a lot of related reading material … I liked that … The Locked Room has an introduction by Michael Connelly and similar essays and articles at the end … and the other two novels too have these ‘extras’ … not bad, I thought …

Of the novels, The Laughing Policeman had blurbs raving about the book and I read in one of the extra articles at the end that this novel was made into a film by Hollywood, probably one of the earliest Swedish crime novels to be made into an English film … these kind of gave me the impetus to read this novel first …

What a novel! Till the middle almost, you are following the solving of a crime and then slowly you find yourself looking at two crimes … an old unsolved one and the current one … and it is done so smoothly that it is after some time that you realise that …

Martin Beck is a police detective and solves crimes along with his colleagues and the writers provide a parallel ‘opinionated’ commentary of contemporary Sweden through the novel … these are ‘police procedure’ novels … and it is said that Martin Beck sort of provided the template for later police detectives in police procedure crime novels like John Rebus (Ian Rankin), Kurt Wallander (Henning Mankell), Alan Banks (Peter Robinson), and others … you know, the kind of police detective who is very much attached to his work, has a drinking problem, married, but a marred married life and moving towards divorce, very few people in the force find him congenial, and so on …

After I reached home, I noticed that each book had a different letter above the serial number on the spine … I wondered what these letters meant … it didn’t make any sense to me at that time …

And then when I went online to see if there are pictures of similar jacket covers which I could use for my post, I saw a photo of the Martin Beck series books which unravelled the mystery of the letters … each book has one letter from the name ‘Martin Beck’ starting from M … how convenient or how coincidental? … did the authors write only ten books and name their detective Martin Beck, a name which has only ten letters, so that a publisher can put each letter on the spine and release the series as a set?  Or was it a smart publisher who has a sudden flash and put ten and ten together? Anyway, I have only four books in the series, and now the combined spines look like this …

And when I complete the set, it would look like this … cool na?

 (picture taken from http://fleurinherworld.com/2010/04/28/roseanna-by-maj-sjowall-per-wahloo/ )

I now have to hunt and hunt like anything for the other 6 books in the series … but, What the Beck maan, I am going to pound the streets and won’t rest till I find them …