Booked to Die by John Dunning Read Free Book Online Page B

places. You know the scene, Dr. J: hell, there’s thirty bookstores in Denver. Probably half of ‘em pay well enough for bookscouts to be able to deal with ’em. Not many places will pay forty percent across the board, but some do. You could narrow it down that way, I guess. Start with the boys up the street, see if they know anything.”
    I thought for a minute. Then I said, “Do either of you know where Bobby lived?”
    “I do,” Ruby said. “I drove him home a couple of times.”
    “You think you could show me where it’s at?”
    “Sure. You want to go now?”
    “In an hour. I want to talk to the boys up the street first.”
    “I’ll be here whenever you say. You better let me sell you this Faulkner before you leave. It’s the world’s best copy and it won’t last long.”
    “How much?”
    “For you…Today?…Ninety-five bucks.”
    Neff groaned as I reached for my checkbook. “Oh, what the hell,” he said. “I get tired of selling Faulkner anyway.”

6
    I walked up the street carrying Mr. William Faulkner under my arm. The next store along the row was Book Heaven, owned by Jerry Harkness.
    Denver is a young man’s book town. In the old days there were only two dealers of note: Fred Rosenstock and Harley Bishop. Those boys died and the book trade fractured into twenty or thirty pieces. The new breed came in and the books changed as well. In Rosenstock’s day you could still find documents signed by Abraham Lincoln or the framers of the Constitution. The trouble was, you couldn’t get much for them. Forty years later, those papers and books are worth small fortunes but can’t be found. What can be found, and sold for good money, is modern lit. We live in a day when first editions by Stephen King outsell Mark Twain firsts ten to one, and at the same price. You explain it: I can’t. Maybe people today really do have more money than brains. Or maybe there’s something in the King craze that’s going over my head. I read
Misery
not long ago and thought it was a helluva book. I’d put it right up with
The Collector
as an example of the horror of abduction, and that’s a heavy compliment since I consider Fowles one of the greatest living novelists. Then I read
Christine
and it was like the book had been written by a different guy. A bigger crock has never been put between two covers. What the hell do I know? I sure can’t explain it when a book like
Solent’s Lot
goes from $10 to almost $1,000 in ten years. That’s half again what a near-perfect
Grapes of Wrath
will bring, if you need a point of reference. You can buy five copies of Hemingway’s
Old Man and the Sea
for that, or six copies of Thomas Wolfe’s
Of Time and the River
. You can buy first editions signed by Rudyard Kipling or Jack London for less money. So the business has changed, no question about it, and the people in it have changed as well. The old guard is dead: long live the new guard. But I can still remember old Harley Bishop, in the year before he died, stubbornly selling King firsts at half the original cover price. The big leap in King books hadn’t yet happened, but even then
The Shining
was a $100 book. Bishop sold me a copy for $4. When I told him he should ask more, he gave me a furrowed look and said, “I don’t believe in Steffan King.”
    Jerry Harkness most definitely did believe in Steffan King. He specialized in King and his followers—Dean Koontz, Clive Barker, et al, the little Kinglets. Behind every big ship you’ll find a dozen little ships atrailing. Most of their plots make absolutely no sense, but again, they stand tall where it really matters in today’s world, at the damn cash register. There’s something seriously wrong with a society when its best-selling writer of all time is Janet Dailey. Don’t ask me to prove it: it’s just something I know. I don’t mind a good scare story once in a while, but Jesus Christ, the junk that goes down! The stupidity of some of these plots that sell in the