Читать онлайн «Booked to Die»

Автор John Dunning

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the Publisher.

Charles Scribner’s Sons Maxwell Macmillan Canada, Inc.

Macmillan Publishing Company 200 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 200

866 Third Avenue Don Mills, Ontario M3C 3N1 New York, NY 10022

Macmillan Publishing Company is part of the Maxwell Communication Group of Companies.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Dunning, John, 1942—

Booked to die: a mystery introducing Cliff Janeway/John Dunning.

p. cm.

ISBN 0-684-19383-3

I. Title.

PS3554.U49394B66 1992 813.54—dc20 91-26889

10 987654321 Printed in the United States of America

To Warwick Downing,

who got me started again,

and

to the Denver antiquarian book trade: the good, the bad, and the ugly

Certain unique books discussed in Booked to Die (Hawthorne’s copy of Moby Dick and Mencken’s copy of This Side of Paradise, among others) have been fictionalized for the sake of the story and may actually reside in real libraries, public or private. Dealers who would argue with the author over prices should remember that the story takes place in 1986. Values on some books have risen dramatically in five years. Catcher in the Rye, for example, is now a $1,500 piece. Interview with the Vampire is usually seen at $600 plus. And so it goes.

BOOKED to DIE

A MYSTERY INTRODUCING CLIFF JANEWAY

Bobby the bookscout was killed at midnight on June 13, 1986. This was the first strange fact, leading to the question, What was he doing out that late at night? To Bobby, midnight was the witching hour and Friday the thirteenth was a day to be spent in bed. He was found in an alley under one of those pulldown iron ladders that give access to a fire escape—another odd thing. In life, Bobby would never walk under a ladder, so it would seem ironic to some people in the Denver book trade when they heard in the morning that he had died there.