Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    Only $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    Bookscout
    Bookscout
    Bookscout
    Ebook37 pages28 minutes

    Bookscout

    By John Dunning

    4/5

    ()

    Read preview

    About this ebook

    For a rare book, a desperate buyer turns to violence

     Six days a week, Joel Beer hunts for books in Denver. He stalks them in bookstores and thrift stores, at yard sales and estate sales, his eyes scanning spines quickly and ruthlessly, searching for the $0.25 gem that he can resell for $250. If he were the only scout in town, he might be able to make a living, but there are close to a dozen full-timers now—including his archrival, Popeye Lamonica—and Joel is having trouble paying his rent.   Facing eviction, Joel and his partner—a slow-witted vagrant named Lacy—go on the hunt. They are about to give up when they find an estate sale offering a $0.50 copy of Walter Behr’s Something for Nothing that is worth $500. But Popeye sees it, too. To make this treasure his, Joel will do whatever it takes—even if it means sacrificing his career.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherMysteriousPress.com Open Road
    Release dateNov 26, 2013
    ISBN9781480456297
    Bookscout
    Author

    John Dunning

    John Dunning (1942–2023) revealed book collecting’s most shocking secrets in his bestselling series of crime novels featuring Cliff Janeway: Booked to Die, which won the prestigious Nero Wolfe Award; The Bookman’s Wake, a New York Times Notable Book; and the New York Times bestsellers The Bookman’s Promise, The Sign of the Book, and The Bookwoman’s Last Fling. He also wrote the Edgar Award–nominated Deadline, The Holland Suggestions, and Two O’Clock, Eastern Wartime. An expert on rare and collectible books, he owned the Old Algonquin Bookstore in Denver for many years. 

    Read more from John Dunning

    Related to Bookscout

    Related ebooks

    Hard-boiled Mystery For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    • Article

      A Year in Reading: David Heska Wanbli Weiden

      Dec 9, 2020

      Little did I know that, in September, just two weeks after the release of my novel, I’d be sitting in my home office in Colorado giving a reading in front of a computer, and that a completely naked eighty-year-old man would appear on the screen. The

      5 min read

    • Article

      Islanders

      Oct 13, 2022

      Islanders
      8 min read

    • Article

      Felix Francis

      Jan 13, 2022

      Felix Francis
      6 min read

    • Article

      'Greeks Bearing Gifts' Will Be The Last In The Popular 'Bernie Gunther' Series Begun In Nazi Germany

      Apr 5, 2018

      The 'Bernie Gunther' books were uniformly superb and reflected their hangdog protagonist: tough, cynical, very quotable, and ultimately, even quixotically, idealistic.

      3 min read

    • Article

      The Many Hats Of Kate Atkinson

      Oct 1, 2018

      KATE ATKINSON PAYS CLOSE ATTENTION TO history—and how it repeats itself. In the best-selling writer’s 10th novel, Transcription, an unlikely spy, Juliet Armstrong, receives an assignment that will alter her life forever. With a complicated structure—

      3 min read

    • Article

      Peter Heller

      Apr 23, 2019

      Peter Heller
      4 min read

    • Article

      Clued Up

      Mar 4, 2021

      To mark the centenary of Agatha Christie’s The Mysterious Affair at Styles, which was published in America in 1920, Writing Magazine poets took up the challenge to write about her life and works, and what her books have meant to the reading and viewi

      4 min read

    • Article

      Asleep At The Gap

      May 7, 2019

      Asleep At The Gap
      16 min read

    • Article

      Stop! Hammock Time

      Aug 1, 2018

      Stop! Hammock Time
      8 min read

    • Article

      A Year in Reading: Chris Stuck

      Dec 3, 2021

      I’ve been in story collection mode for the last year and a half, editing my collection, studying other collections, trying to live up to my favorites. The post A Year in Reading: Chris Stuck appeared first on The Millions.

      3 min read

    • Article

      Shelve This in Memoir: Confessions of a Teenage Bookseller

      Sep 5, 2022

      I’d begged my way into this job in the hopes that it might lead me closer to a literary life. And it would. Eventually. The post Shelve This in Memoir: Confessions of a Teenage Bookseller appeared first on The Millions.

      10 min read

    • Article

      Swansongs And Southern Discomfort

      Oct 27, 2022

      THE BORDERLAND BETWEEN popular fiction and literary fiction is now fertile territory. Once upon a time it was easy to tell them apart. Popular and genre fiction were in small format paper-backs, literary fiction larger: now all have been promoted to

      6 min read

    • Article

      A Year in Reading: Jonathan Escoffery

      Dec 15, 2021

      This year, perhaps more than any other in my adult life, I’ve yearned for narratives that promise big things will happen in the lives of the characters they feature. The post A Year in Reading: Jonathan Escoffery appeared first on The Millions.

      5 min read

    • Article

      I’m a Stained-Glass Guy: The Millions Interviews Kevin Barry

      Aug 30, 2019

      I’m moving more toward subtraction than addition. Which isn’t to say that the next novel won’t be a big and baggy monster. You change all the time. The post I’m a Stained-Glass Guy: The Millions Interviews Kevin Barry appeared first on The Millions.

      9 min read

    • Article

      Edgar Allan Poe Was a Broke-Ass Freelancer

      Sep 12, 2017

      For his entire oeuvre—all his fiction, poetry, criticism, lectures—Poe earned only about $6,200 in his lifetime, or approximately $191,087 adjusted for inflation. The post Edgar Allan Poe Was a Broke-Ass Freelancer appeared first on The Millions.

      8 min read

    • Article

      A Year in Reading: Mateo Askaripour

      Dec 14, 2021

      Looking back on it now, 2021 was a year that I learned what it meant to not just be a reader, or a writer, but also a literary citizen. The post A Year in Reading: Mateo Askaripour appeared first on The Millions.

      5 min read

    • Article

      My Favourite Read

      Feb 5, 2024

      My Favourite Read
      3 min read

    • Article

      A Year in Reading: Michael Zadoorian

      Dec 19, 2019

      To make myself feel better, I tell myself that the books I do get around to reading are read well and deeply. This is, of course, bullshit. The post A Year in Reading: Michael Zadoorian appeared first on The Millions.

      4 min read

    Related categories

    Reviews for Bookscout

    4/5

    15 ratings1 review

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

    • 5/5
      I have to admit that I read this short story about a man who spends six days a week hunting for books in Denver simply because I miss John Dunning's books. A lot of the things I learned about the value of first editions, etc., I learned from reading Dunning's superb Cliff Janeway mysteries, and if you haven't read them, I do hope you'll give them a try. (The first one is Booked to Die.) Joel Beer could make a good living as a bookscout if he were the only one in Denver, but he's not. He's got stiff competition, especially from Popeye Lamonica. But when Joel and his partner Lacy-- a slow-witted vagrant-- are facing eviction, Joel is determined to find that elusive book that will pay all the bills and set them up.What happens is all about truth, the human spirit, and the magic of books. As a rule, I am not a re-reader, but I may have to make an exception for John Dunning. The man is Good.

    Book preview

    Bookscout - John Dunning

    Introduction

    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

    Enjoying the preview?
    Page 1 of 1