Booking

I schlepped out to the 31st annual Paperback Collectors Show & Sale in Mission Hills as I do almost every year. It seemed to me that there were fewer dealers today than in years past and that the selection wasn't as good. Even so, I managed to find a few books I couldn't live without…

RATHER A VICIOUS GENTLEMAN, FOR MURDER I CHARGE MORE and OF ALL THE BLOODY CHEEK by Frank McAuliffe (and then discovered, when I got home, that I already had two of the books!)

TILL IT HURTS by Nick Quarry (Marvin Albert)

24 HOURS TO KILL by James McKimmey

HORSEMEN FROM HELL by Homer Hatten (whom I never of, I just liked the title and the jacket copy)

SOUND OF GUNFIRE by Frank Bonham

DEATHS LONG SHADOW by Jay Barbette (Bart Spicer)

There was a guy with a very bad toupee showing people pictures of his naked girlfriend — which I thought was strange until I overheard another guy, apparently in his late 50s, lamenting to a dealer that he wasn't buying as many books now that "he'd become a father for the first time late in life" and his new wife, "an ex-Playboy centerfold ten years younger than me," was demanding more of his attention. I walked away before he could whip out a nude photo of her, too. I don't carry around a nude photo of my wife to show people. In fact, I don't have any nude photos of her at all. I should discuss that with her tonight. 

5 thoughts on “Booking”

  1. I just ordered it. Bill Crider has raved about this series and he hasn’t steered me wrong yet. A few years back, i started the first book and wasn’t wowed enough to keep at it, but perhaps I wasn’t in the right frame of mind.
    Lee

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  2. I know you hit these things at the crack of dawn; I crawled along later and although you’d probably left by then, I did bump into my old friend Pete Atkins, whom I haven’t seen in 20 years. I left with a small bag of goodies including a replacement copy of Howard Clewes’ THE LONG MEMORY, an atmospheric little suspenser that plays like a revenge western in the English marshlands.

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  3. There isn’t a shelf of books anywhere that I don’t scrowl through the titles and either buy the book or wish I did. If a person has a love of books, and a love of stories, and a love of authors, then somehow, they have important things to say to society in their own stories, no matter how lame they believe their own stories to be. And they are never as lame as the composer thinks they are. God bless writers!

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  4. Lee, thanks for the suggestion at LCC to go to this thing. I was able to fill out some of my collections and found some previously unknown to me authors to become obsessed over.
    Came home with two giant bags full of books.

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