Bookscout

Introduction

Bookscout

I
HAVE ALWAYS LOVED
a good short story. A story offers a concentrated moment of truth that’s difficult to achieve in the sprawling expanse of a novel. Here, in a space of 5,000 words, the hero is put to a test and in this his entire life is revealed. Writer and reader join in a brief dream, and if the final vision is slightly different for each reader, this underscores the art, heightens rather than undercuts it.

As everyone knows, short fiction has been a casualty of the times. It’s true that stories are still being written. Anthologies, though they are usually the first candidates for the remainder tables at the year-end clearout of publishers’ warehouses, are still being published. But the days are long gone when the story was a prime-time magazine entertainment. Magazines today are like flytraps for such momentous “nonfiction” topics as breast enlargement, bedroom aerobatics and celebrity profiles. That each of these articles is a clone of all the others seems not to matter much: the magazines thrive (at least those with the biggest boobs and the very best fourposter foreplay seem to do okay), and the short story goes the way of all good things.

C’est la freaking guerre.

I learned to write by reading short fiction, notably the stories of Ernest Hemingway and Irwin Shaw. I have always considered Shaw an underrated master: Such tales as
Sailor off the Bremen
and
Act of Faith
seemed to me then (and still do) to be beautifully conceived and realized. Shaw is still one of my cornerstones, one who led the way into the land of consonants and vowels and demonstrated how well short work can be done. He wrote some great novels too, his sniveling critics be damned. I think his best book is
The Troubled Air,
a gripping narrative of the radio business in the shadow of McCarthyism. Sadly, it is seldom read today, and if teachers and critics ever mention his name it’s his short work they recommend. Even the critics have to admit that Shaw wrote superb stories.

The magazines of the forties were sometimes described as a training ground for novelists, but they were much more than that. Often those nickel-a-word monthlies kept a struggling writer alive while he wrote his first big book, and in the process a vast and valuable national inventory of short literature was amassed. By the time I was able to string three sentences together, this era was in full retreat. Writers today stay alive as best they can. They teach. They sell blood. They dress up their waiflike children like characters from Dickens and send them into the streets with tin cups to beg for gruel. Some, like yours truly, are lucky enough to have working wives. And when they write, they tend to work on books, figuring that a novel has at least a chance of someday paying for itself.

I yearn unabashedly for the old days. How great it would be to take two months off between books and “write some stories” as Hemingway used to do, and to know there’s a hungry market waiting, whether you’re Ernest Hemingway at the top of your game or Joe Blow just getting started.

For one who professes to love the story, my output has been rather piddling. It seems I’m always too busy trying to make a living. I did write a few a dozen years ago, during a brief residence at a Denver magazine. The first of these,
Bookscout,
still has a warm place in my heart. More than anything I’ve written, this goes to the core of what I am, both as a writer and as a bookhunter. The character is not me, but I can identify with his situation. I’ve been able to wear two hats in the book world—have separate, complementing careers within the same incredibly rich field of work—and in this I consider myself truly a lucky man. How many of us find even one career that sustains us for a lifetime, in all the ways that really count?

I come full circle, back to Shaw. I remember bookscouting in my early days, beating the bushes much as my man Joel does in these pages. There was never enough money: The first of the month was coming and the rent was due, and I was in one of those low ebbs when the best you can find is a thirtieth printing of
Your Erroneous Zones
and a waterstained Dr. Atkins. I was in grave danger of buying bad books just to be buying
something,
anything. In a north Denver thrift store was a copy of Shaw’s career-capping story collection,
Five Decades.
The price was right, 69-cents, but it was a book club edition and everyone knows you can’t sell book club fiction. I fondled it and finally put it back.

A week later it was still there.
It must be fate,
I thought, and I bought the damned book and took it out to the car feeling like a fool. But when I thumbed it, $200 cash fell out in my lap.

I’ll always remember what I thought then.
You know, this isn’t a bad way to make a living.

And it’s still a pretty good way.

John Dunning

Denver, Colorado

January, 1998

H
IS NAME WAS JOEL BEER
, but even that was partly made up. Often he felt like a character on manuscript paper, like someone he himself had made up long ago. In a sense, of course, that was true. There was no Joel Beer. Even this time and place were imaginary; the people, himself included, were like toys shoved hither and yon by some giant author beyond the clouds. On a rainy day, it was possible to imagine the thunder as the tapping of giant typewriter keys. Even the city was unreal. Just because it was called Denver, Colorado, and the encyclopedias said it had been here for a long time, that didn’t make it so. In the world an author creates, things leap full-blown to life as needed. If a character needs tradition, the author creates it out of whole cloth. He makes up something called Encyclopedia Americana and puts Volume Eight in his character’s hands. “Denver,” he reads, “a city in Colorado, capitol of the state coextensive with Denver County.” And on and on until he’s convinced. The author moves his character out of the Denver Public Library and there, a block away, is the gold-domed statehouse. The proof is all around, changeless and ever-changing, and yet, in his sixtieth year, Joel Beer was less than ever convinced about the reality of life. Today, as the city lay in the embrace of late autumn, even the man on the radio, reading wire copy about the deadly serious friction between the United States and the Soviet Union, seemed like a voice from a comic strip.

The radio, after a two-year silence, had begun playing again just last spring. The car had hit a vicious chuckhole and suddenly the radio boomed out of nowhere. “I’ll be damned,” Joel had muttered with pleasure. “It’s gonna be a good day.” And it had; he still remembered it. He had scouted the east side, hitting all the thrift stores from Broadway to Peoria Street. He had turned up some nuggets; not diamonds, not even rubies, but a few good garnets. There was a first edition Nelson Algren, the best book he’d found in four months. Would that it were one of the early ones,
Never Come Morning,
say, or, please God,
Somebody in Boots.
But even
A Walk on the Wild Side
was good enough to cover expenses and a few meals. It was a $50 book to collectors. Mark Ramsey, the book dealer on East Colfax, could get that for it in this condition without much trouble, and that meant at least $15 to Joel. And that was before his other books were bought and tallied. Sometimes Ramsey surprised him: sometimes he’d pick out a dog that nobody’d ever heard of and pay plenty for it. All depended on who wanted it and how much. Ramsey was always fair to him—at least, Joel had never caught him being otherwise. Ramsey appreciated him; he knew Joel understood books and he paid well for that expertise. And that day, the day of the radio chuckhole, Ramsey had given him $40 cash. Twenty for the Algren and four to five for each of four other items. His other books, a round dozen, he’d sold off to dealers of less class for a buck a piece. They had each cost fifty cents, making his total outlay ten bucks and his income $52. Figure five for gas and he’d cleared at least $35 for his day’s work.

This was his life. He did it six days a week without fail: get up, get out and hit the streets by nine. Work the stores along east Colfax Avenue, or south along Broadway; occasionally hit the west side or the Goodwill up north. In the summer he scouted garage and estate sales. He scouted the newspapers for book sales of any kind. If he had been the only bookscout in Denver, he might have made a good living. But the competition was getting fierce; there were at least half a dozen fulltime scouts and God knew how many people who just came to the stores and picked off the good stuff by accident. There was a middle-aged woman who had begun turning up in the Goodwills last year. Well-dressed, affluent-looking, she had suddenly begun buying
his
books (he couldn’t help thinking of them that way), and he had grown to resent her and later hate her for her arrogance. The hate had come to full flower one morning when they had arrived at the Goodwill together. He had seen the John Barth first, but she had reached it first.
The Floating Opera,
Christ Jesus, Barth’s first novel, a $300 book. She fingered it and he winced as the dust cover tore slightly under her fingers. She considered it with great deliberation while Joel tried to look disinterested. She started to put it down. He held his breath. She picked it up again. He sighed. Then she looked up, met his eyes, smiled, and tucked the book under her arm. He’d hated her ever since.

It wasn’t the first time, or the last, that she’d beaten him to a prize. Her eyes worked as if by radar; she seemed to know when he coveted an item, and she went straight to it. And it couldn’t be the money with her: he never saw her in bookstores selling what she’d scouted, and she was always dressed to kill. Only the celestial author theory gave reason to her being. The author of life had put her on earth to bedevil him. Any good story has to have conflict—who knew that better than himself? Good vs. evil, man vs. nature, man vs. man. Man vs. woman, with something important at stake. The John Barth was worth $75 to a bookscout who knew where to sell it. That was hardly on a par with the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, but drama is where you find it. It’s all relative, and when the scouting was bad and no books were to be found, when the rent was due and the money all spent, seventy-five bucks was like a small shot of life.

Most of the time, Joel lived a quiet life. In Ramsey’s bookstore, he was known simply as Joel the bookscout. The most dramatic thing that ever happened to him was missing a good book and a few heartbeats in the process, and there wasn’t much drama in that. If there were such things as cosmic authors, it would follow that there would also be cosmic audiences. Writers must write for someone, and who out there beyond the clouds would want to read about a lone bookscout in a made-up place called Denver, Colorado? A real story must have more at stake than missing a meal. If there were celestial authors, this one must be very bad indeed, to have come up with an empty story like this.

But that isn’t true at all. This story has good and evil, a villain, love and even tragedy of sorts. And Joel Beer was about to confront them all, in a single day of what he had come to consider a drab life.