Murder at the Bookshop Transcript

Caroline: Certain jobs and pastimes come with a higher degree of risk. This we know. I hope that everyone who decides to become a racing driver, or climb a mountain without ropes, or chase tornados, understands that their chosen activity comes with a heightened chance of injury or death.

What about the person who steps into a bookshop just hoping to indulge in a little browsing, though? Or, heaven forbid, someone who runs such an emporium, sharing their love of books with employees and customers? Buying and selling books appears, on the surface, to be an entirely safe way to spend your time.

Not in a golden age detective novel, though. Join me, won't you, for a thrilling romp through the many instances of murder at the bookshop.

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Welcome to Shedunnit. I'm Caroline Crampton.

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I like spending time in bookshops, and I think you probably do too. The allure of a murder mystery with such a setting is clear on this level: people who write books tend to enjoy being in the places where they are sold, as do those who read them, and it's pleasing to have a familiar location appear in what you are reading. Writers can write bookshop mysteries and feel sure that their readers will be able to picture their setting with ease. And because everyone is so well acquainted with this setting and so well disposed towards it, we get some marvellous descriptions of bookshops that have been turned into crime scenes by unscrupulous murderers.

Take this one, for instance, from Death of Mr Dodsley by John Ferguson from 1937. A police constable on his beat in the early hours of the morning has just noticed that the door of a bookshop on the Charing Cross is ajar. He enters to investigate:

"The searching light passed along the row of books, up and down the floor, till it picked out the leg of a table and then ascending, threw into brilliant prominence the telephone standing on the writing table with the white pages of a book lying open alongside. Suddenly Roberts, seeing something on the pages of the book, deflected his light on the position which the chair would normally have occupied. He got the chair at once. It was one of those swivel chairs with tripod legs, and it had been swung round so that it now faced the door. Any one sitting in it would have been looking straight at Roberts himself. Then Roberts, impelled by what he had seen on the white pages of the book, directed his light on to the carpet. It was a fine Turkish patterned carpet with a lot of red in its design. In a moment, however, he saw a red which was not there by the the weaver's design, and beyond the stain lay the body of the chair's last occupant."

I think this is a wonderfully evocative piece of writing, with the slow-moving torch beam illuminating different elements of the darkened shop in turn: the rows of books on their shelves, the telephone, the opened pages of one volume, and then the carpet that is now redder than its weaver intended.

Even in this early, establishing description of the scene in this bookshop murder mystery, the books themselves feel more like characters than inanimate objects in the background. This idea is made explicit in another bookshop murder mystery from the following year, Phoebe Atwood Taylor's Beginning With A Bash. Dot Peters, who has recently inherited a rather down-at-heel Boston bookshop from her uncle, only for a customer to be murdered there on her second day in charge, laments that "if only the books could talk" they would know who had committed the crime immediately.

She continues:

"Gives you a funny feeling of how everlasting books are compared to human beings, doesn’t it? Think of what those books could tell us about this affair if they could only speak up! Think of all the things that have happened around them, anyway!"

The books are witnesses, but frustratingly mute ones. Sometimes it is the variety of books that creates an aura of wonder around them in this kind of mystery. In Carolyn Wells' Murder in the Bookshop from 1936, we are told that the crime scene contains "books you’d forgotten and books you wished you had forgotten. Rare books and always genuine. Queer books, holy books and poems by the Sweet Singer of Michigan".

In Death in a Bookstore by Augusto De Angelis, published the same year, the sheer volume of books feels oppressive to his detective, Inspector De Vincenzi. The Milan bookshop where he must investigate a murder is not nearly as salubrious as some of the others that appear in this type of story. "The back of the shop consisted of two rooms, one next to the other, with a third smaller room to the right of the first. And those three rooms, with ceiling-high windows with bars facing the courtyard, were also full of old books. Many books. Too many books. The rooms, with their dim, swampy light, smelled of dust."

There is a moment near the beginning of this Italian murder mystery that I think speaks directly to the book-obsessed reader. A policeman named Maccari has been on guard in the shop since the body was discovered, waiting for more senior officers to arrive and take charge. It's boring work and Maccari is a reader; he can't resist taking a book off the shelf and passing the time with it, even if this is a crime scene. As the Superintendent and the inspector arrive, Maccari snaps out of his reading reverie. "With one hand, he took off his hat, with the other one he kept holding the book, putting his finger across the pages as a bookmark... Maccari respected and feared authority but he knew what was important." Keeping his place in his book matters just as much as doing his job well. Anyone who has ever stealthily read under the counter or behind the till at their place of work might recognise this impulse.

As I went further into my exploration of bookshops in murder mysteries, though, I came to realise that their suitability as a setting for crime fiction goes far beyond their familiarity to readers or writers. A bookshop can be a place of high passions and dark secrets, albeit ones that mostly remain concealed as customers and proprietors shuffle around picking up this volume or that.

Bibliomania, which the Oxford English Dictionary defines as "extreme enthusiasm or passion for collecting, owning, or reading books", is a powerful force in these stories. Max Boyle, a recurring Watson character in the mystery novels of R.T. Campbell, opens the 1946 mystery Bodies in a Bookshop with an account of his own bibliomania. It drives him to keep visiting shops and buying books even though he doesn't want or need them:

"I don’t know what came over me. It wasn’t as if there were not enough books in the house to begin with. There were books on the floor, books on all the tables, books on the beds — and in the beds if one wasn’t careful."

Yet Max still finds himself on a bookshop crawl of the Charing Cross Road district of London one dismal afternoon, unable to stop himself from spending money he doesn't have on rare and unusual editions. At one point, he even compares his lack of impulse control around books to alcohol addiction, saying that "the trouble with bookshops is that they are as bad as pubs. You start with one and then you drift to another, and before you know where you are you are on a gigantic book-binge."

Eventually, Max's quest leads him to the out-of-the-way shop of one Allan Leslie, and he browses for quite a while before realising that said proprietor is lying dead in the backroom of the shop. Max's boss, the botanist Professor John Stubbs, jumps into investigating the case with glee, but their Scotland Yard associate, Chief Inspector Bishop, finds it difficult to understand how mere books can arouse such fervour in people. “All I can say is that there are a lot of fools in the world,” he announced cheerfully, “just imagine giving all that money for a handful of books. Cor!”

This lust for books is present in every bookshop mystery I have read so far, either as a major motive or a minor subplot. In Murder in the Bookshop by Carolyn Wells, it helps us understand the single-minded, blinkered nature of the murder victim, a wealthy New Yorker named Philip Balfour. Early on in the story, we learn that he cares far more about his book collection than his wife — when his librarian tries to resign because he has developed feelings for said wife, Balfour indicates that he'd rather keep the librarian than the wife. Such is the intensity of his obsession with his book collection that he has a soundproof room built in his apartment so that he can't be overheard when doing business with book dealers. It seems only fitting, in a grim way, that Balfour should die while browsing in his favourite secondhand bookshop.

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The bookshop is more than just a setting in these books, though. It's often integral to the plot itself. There's always a good reason why the murder has happened in this place rather than any other. These are not random acts of violence occurring in random places. In some cases, the very fact that bookselling is considered to be a dry, safe line of business is the reason why it has now been drawn into a murder investigation.

In Beginning with a Bash, Dot Peters is incredulous at the turn her life has taken, saying "It just wasn’t real... Racketeers, burglaries, stolen cars, bullets, murders, book thieves! And she had thought that the life of a secondhand bookstore proprietress would be as dull and dusty as the second-hand books!" In De Angelis's Death in a Bookstore, a character laughs at the idea of leaving a body to be found in a such a shop. "It was perfect. No one would suspect me," they chuckle to themselves. And, sure enough, Inspector De Vincenzi exclaims in surprise when he hears that a prominent Milanese surgeon and politician has been found shot dead in a bookshop. "What was he doing in a bookshop in the middle of the night?," he demands to know.

The Scotland Yard detectives in John Ferguson's Death of Mr Dodsley feel morose that they have to investigate a murder that took place in a shop. "A shop murder is different..." Sergeant Crabb says, despondently. They recall a previous case of a death in an empty shop that they failed to crack and reckon their chances are even worse in Mr Dodsley's busy and well-staffed secondhand bookshop, where there is a constant stream of customers and possible suspects. "That's what makes it worse than if it had been done in a house. In a house you can narrow down your possibles," Inspector Mallet says. By choosing to commit their crime in the bookshop, the murderer has automatically increased their chances of getting away with it.

This point is backed up by another character in the book, Francis McNab, a private detective who had been called in by Mr Dodsley prior to his death to look into some thefts from the shop. "A bookshop is a first-rate place for unobtrusive observation," McNab says. "One can remain in it an indefinite time, dipping into one book after another, all over the place." It's a great place to dawdle, legitimately, and observe the routines of staff and other customers. Hanging around for hours over the course of several days in a different kind of shop might attract suspicion, but in a bookshop that's just a sign of a really keen customer, or perhaps a bibliomanic desperate for another fix. Given this, it is not hard for a thief or a murderer to surreptitiously gain an understanding of how the bookshop runs and then turn this knowledge to their advantage.

Although readers and characters alike might find the juxtaposition of a murder and a bookshop notable or even comic, there is evidence in these books that running a bookshop does already come with potential connections to crime. Several of the booksellers in these titles dabble in illegal but related activity on the side. Mr Leslie, the murder victim and principal bookseller in R.T. Campbell's Bodies in the Bookshop has a lucrative side business selling banned or obscene books and erotic art. He deals in "seamier sort o’ literature", as another character puts it. This in turn provides material for potential blackmail against customers and dealers who would rather not have their private tastes exposed in public. Blackmail crops up in Death of Mr Dodsley, too, portrayed as an extension of the bookseller's interest in autographed letters and other ephemera. If some of the original owners of this material would prefer to pay to keep it off the open market, then that's just good business, isn't it? Or at least, that's how some unscrupulous characters see it.

There's also evidence that Campbell's bookseller character Allan Leslie is happy to act as a fence for stolen books. He doesn't ask questions about provenance when a valuable item is presented to him for sale at a good price. As amateur detective Professor Stubbs describes it, this is "none of your ordinary stealin’ either, but books worth in the region o’ hundreds o’ pounds, books which a collector might covet, but which he would need to keep hidden." Bodies in a Bookshop was published just after the end of the Second World War in 1946 and it is also suggested that the chaos and racketeering that went on during the war years has made it easier for Leslie to carry on the illegal side of his business.

Francis McNab looks into London's black market for stolen rare books in Death of Mr Dodsley, too, when he goes looking for places where a thief could sell on such stolen goods without being handed over to the police. He finds that none of the major book dealers in London would touch such material, and therefore concludes that the books that had gone missing from Dodsley's shop were either being smuggled out of London, or that the thief was a collector stealing on his own behalf. Once again, it is implied that someone in the grips of bibliomania will do anything to acquire the books they want.

Although relatively easy to steal, rare books are not objects that can be quickly turned into cash, we learn from several of these stories. Murder in the Bookshop by Carolyn Wells features a unique antiquarian book that bears the rare signature of American Founding Father Button Gwinnett. When it disappears from the scene of a murder in a bookshop, the investigators speculate that it has to be considered kidnapped rather than stolen, simply because there is no way the criminal could sell it on without it being identified as stolen goods. The best way to turn realise cash from the crime would be to demand a ransom in exchange for the book's safe return.

Here we can take a little diversion into a tale of real book-related crimes perpetrated by the author of a bookshop murder mystery. R.T. Campbell was a penname used by the Scottish artist and poet Ruthven Todd, who was friends with, among other literary luminaries, his fellow pseudonymous detective novelist Cecil Day Lewis slash Nicholas Blake. Todd was at one time so hard up that he stole books from his landlord — the poet and editor Geoffrey Grigson — to sell secondhand in order to pay his rent. Grigson discovered what was going on when a London bookseller contacted him to say that a letter addressed to Grigson had been found in some stock he had bought.

When a second book turned up with the same seller with Grigson's signature in it, Todd's system became clear. His rent was ten shillings. He appropriated a book or books worth roughly that much, went down to the Charing Cross Road, and sold them. He then gave that ten shillings to Grigson's wife Frances in payment for his room and board. The Grigsons decided not to confront Todd about this, and instead Grigson would visit the bookseller and pay the ten shillings back to retrieve his stolen books. According to Grigson's later autobiography Recollections, this system remained in place for quite some time. Although Todd was never stealing books worth more than ten shillings, knowing that he had some personal knowledge of the contact between bookselling and theft does add a different dimension to plot points about John Donne and William Blake first editions that change hands in Bodies in a Bookshop.

Of course, in a golden age murder mystery, the puzzle elements are always key. And by setting their scene in a bookshop, writers are able to bring in the kind of riddle element that mystery readers so enjoy. A bookshop is a place of secrets, full of rare manuscripts, forgotten letters, and undiscovered gems. In Murder in the Bookshop by Carolyn Wells, that valuable book autographed by Button Gwinnett has its own stunt double that confounds readers and characters alike. Beginning with a Bash is full of these elements, from a clue to hidden treasure hidden in a lost book to a secret passage discovered in the basement of Dot Peters' newly-inherited bookshop. Death of Mr Dodsley takes the prize for the most involved plot element, though. A character publishes a mystery novel set in a bookshop and then when an actual murder is committed in the bookshop that inspired the story, they are terrified that their fiction has given a real murderer their method of killing.

The best bookshop mysteries are the ones where the shop provides not only the setting and atmosphere, but the solution as well. It is Francis McNab's deep dive into the world of London's secondhand book market that provides his breakthrough on the case in Death of Mr Dodsley. Similarly, Inspector De Vincenzi is able to apprehend the murderer in Death in a Bookstore because of a book-based deduction. All of the chasing around Boston in stolen cars and hiding in concealed cupboards that goes on in Beginning With a Bash is because of a book.

Bookshop mysteries are just one type of bibliomystery that was popular during the golden age of detective fiction, though. Authors loved to plunder every aspect of the book publishing experience in order to create crime fiction. There are book-related mysteries set in libraries, publishing houses, archives and more, and perhaps we'll explore these together another time. But for now, let us be content with the mysterious pleasures to be found in bookshops, both real and fictional.

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This episode of Shedunnit was written, narrated, and produced by me, Caroline Crampton. You can find links to all the books and sources it referenced in the episode description and at shedunnitshow.com/murderatthebookshop. I publish transcripts of every episode including this one; find them all at shedunnitshow.com/transcripts.

If you'd like to ensure the podcast's continued existence and get some extra audio goodies in the bargain, become a paying supporter now at shedunnitbookclub.com/join.

Shedunnit is edited by Euan McAleece and production assistance came from Leandra Griffith.

Thanks for listening.