Small House of Everything

Small House of Everything

Thursday, November 3, 2022

FORGOTTEN BOOK: BODIES IN A BOOKSHOP

Bodies in a Bookshop by "R. T. Campbell" (Ruthven Campbell Todd) (1946, as Bodies in a Bookshop:  A Detective Story)

Here's how it opens:

"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.  Only that morning I had removed three volumes of Curtis from my room.  How they came to be there I would not know.  There seems to be a plot between the old man, Professor John Stubbs, and his housekeeper, Mrs. Farley, to dump anything they like in my room.  So far as I am concerned this is fine.  I like books.  I like mess.  But I have books enough and mess enough of my own.

"Anyhow I had gone out with the intention of buying a book.  It wasn't that I wanted any book.  I had made up my mind.  I wanted to read Luis Trenchard More's life of my famous namesake, Robert Boyle, the father of chemistry and the uncle of the Earl of Cork.

"I went to Zwimmer's in the Charing Cross Road.  I found the book had been published in America and was out of stock, so I crawled up Gower Street, to see if there was an old copy left in H. K. Lewis's.  There wasn't.

"Having made up my mind that I wanted the life of Robert Boyle I started going around to all the bookshops I could find.  This was fine, but I kept on running into other books I wanted.  I spent the devil of a lot of money.  I said to myself that it didn't really matter very much if I failed to get the Life of Boyle, I had gathered enough to keep me reading for at least a fortnight."

How can any bibliophile worth his salt not continue reading?  Certainly not I.

Our hapless narrator is Max Boyle, a young botonist and assistant to the irascible  and famous John Stubbs, currently writing a massive tome, History of Botony.  Boyle and the "old man" have a history of stumbling onto murder cases -- this is the fourth of seven novels in the series, whicb also features Chief Inspector Reginald F. Bishop of Scotland Yard.  Stubbs is a large, outspoken Scot with an inrdinate fondness for beer and brandy and a habit of driving his Bentley like a maniac.  He speaks in a lower-class accent and blunders through almost every scene with the grace of a water buffalo.  If you squint you can almoss recognize the relationship between Stubbs and Max as similar to that between Nero and Archie -- assuming Nero had somehow inherited a bulldozing gene from Bertha Cool of Erle Stanley Gardner's "A. A. Fair" novels.

Anyway, Max's last stop is a dusty out of the way bookshop.  There are no customers in sight and Max assumes the owner, Allan Leslie, was busy in his office in the back of the building.  Max happily browses for over an hour, finding several worthwhile goodies to puchase.  Still, there was no sign of the owner.  As Max brings his purchases to the cunter he rcgnizes the distinct smell f gas coming from the shop's office.  The door is bolted from the outside and Max assumes the owner had stepped out and forgot t turn off the gas ring with which he made his tea.  Max unlocks the door, intending to turn off the gas as a favor to the owner, only to find the nozzle rusted shut.  What he also found was two bodies on the floor.  Max drags the bodies out to the street, hoping they were still alive.  They weren't.  Each had been knocked unconscious by a heavy blow to the back of the head, in the case of the shop owner the blw was severe enugh to have eventually killed him if the gas had not already done the job.

Allan Leslie had a reputation as an honest and fair bookdealer, albeit somewhat testy.  The other victim was Cecil Baird, a man whose reputation and popularity among those in the book business was less than stellar.   An investigation of Leslie's office records, though, show that Leslie had a side occupation -- dealing in pornography and stolen books.  Baird's sideline turned out to be blackmail.  (When we say prngraphy, please remember we are dealing with the blue-nosed 1940s and the dirty books and pictures would not raise an eyebrow today.  We're talking Lady Chatterly's Lover, the drawings of William Blake, and perhaps certain Japanese prints.  Ho-hum.)

The reader is then taken down a\the fantasy rabbit hole of the obsessed private collector.  The investigation focuses on four book dealers who had been doing business with Leslie, and on Leslie's spinster niece/housekeeper, none of whom have a sufficient motive for double murder, although few have solid alibis.  To add to the strangeness of the mystery  Stubbs decides uncharacteristically that he does not want to solve the murders.

The joy of the book lies in the quirky world of book collecting and in the interaction between the hapless Max Boyle, the boisterous John Stubbs. and the somewhat taciturn Inspector Bishop.  While not a true classic of the genre, I found Bodies in a Bookshop impossible to put down.


Ruthven Campbell Todd (1914-1978) was a Scottish poet, artist, novelist, and expert on William Blake.  He was friends with Dylan Thomas, Louis MacNiece, Wyndham Lewis, Julian Symons, Rex Warner, David Gascoyne. Joan Miro, W. H. Auden and other literary and artistic limelights of the time.  One of his jobs was keep a dozing Ezra Pound awake while Wyndham Lewis was painting his portrait.  In 1936, during the  International Surrealist Convention he had to save Salvador Dali from suffocating in a heavy diving suit.  He was one of Dylan Thomas's friends and was part of the events surrounding the poet's death in 1953.

In the fantasy field he was noted for writing the four popular juvenile books about Space Cat -- Space Cat (1952), Space Cat Visits Venus (1955), Space Cat Meets Mars (1957), and Space Cat and the Kittens (1958).  (Another series I've been meaning to read for years.  **sigh**)

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