Book Round-Up: Bibliomysteries Edition

The Mysterious Bookshop in downtown Manhattan is publishing a Bibliomystery series, short stories or novellas by various mystery writers that center around a book, bookstore, or library. When I went for my birthday, I picked up a few.

The Caxton Private Lending Library & Book Depository by John Connolly: this was a fun little story about a bookish accountant who stumbles upon a special library housing not only first editions, but a number of characters from those books that have come to life -- shades of Eileen Favorite's The Heroines and Jasper Fforde's The Eyre Affair.

The Book of the Lion by Thomas Perry: A lost Chaucerian manuscript is being held hostage by a nefarious character, and a professor and his billionaire friend try to claim the manuscript before it is destroyed forever. It was entertaining, but I think I would have preferred a longer work, and more time spent on the lost manuscript (it apparently did exist at one point).

The Little Men by Megan Abbott: This story mostly takes place in the former apartment of a bookseller, but it ultimately was a psychological thriller that had little to do with books.

Reconciliation Day by Christopher Fowler: I liked this one a lot (no surprise, I like Fowler's Peculiar Crimes series, too).  It involves the original manuscript to Stoker's Dracula, and is appropriately creepy and weird.

Seven Years by Peter Robinson: of all the ones I read, this one was probably closest to a traditional mystery -- a cryptic inscription in an old book leads to an unsolved death and a missing person. It had a distinctly Christie-ish vibe.

Bibliotheca Classica by Simon Brett: The choice of a deeply unreliable narrator made this a lot of fun to read. Professor Rounsevell is curious to discover the origins of his bowdlerized copy of the Bibliotheca Classica, but being both a snob and a technophobe he leaves most of the work to his long-suffering wife. I was tickled to learn that the more common name for the text is Lempriere's Dictionary, which is the title of a (disappointing) Lawrence Norfolk book I read ages ago.

Thursday Next

Having just reread the first three in Jasper Fforde's series (The Eyre Affair, Lost in a Good Book, and The Well of Lost Plots) and read the next two for the first time (Something Rotten and First Among Sequels), I find I don't have a lot to say about them -- which is just as well, as I have two papers and a take-home final to complete in the next week and a half.

I will say that the Thursday Next series, set in an alternate universe where literature is taken very seriously, is a mash-up of all my favorite genres -- fantasy, mystery, literary fiction, and metafiction. The books are goofy and irreverent and fun and stuffed with neat concepts, like the Book World where texts are created for publication (or not) in the real world, and people getting trapped inside fiction, and illegally re-engineered extinct species like dodos and Neanderthals (the Neanderthal society Fforde has created is fascinating). There is one more book in the series coming out within the next couple of years, and so First Among Sequels ends on a cliff-hanger, with someone trying to kill Temperance Brennan, Next, and other heroes of book series -- a serial killer, if you will. I'm just surprised it took Fforde so long to work that in.

Every time I read the books, I find myself wishing I lived in a world where productions of Richard the Third are events like the Rocky Horror Picture Show, there are street gangs devoted to who wrote the Shakespearean plays, and people read Jane Eyre with bated breath in case a villain tries to remove her from the book. So much more interesting than our current fascination with celebrities and scandals.