Books like The Bookman's Promise

The man said, "So we have a mystery here as well as a valuable book," and it all began then. Its roots went back to another time, when Richard Francis Burton met his greatest admirer and then set off on a secret journey, deep into the troubled American South. Because of that trip a friend of mine died. An old woman found peace, a good man lost everything, and I rediscovered myself on my continuing journey across the timeless, infinite world of books. Cliff Janeway, the brawling bookseller, ex-cop turned private investigator when he is not hunting for rare and expensive books, is back with a fifty grand paycheck from his last case. The best investment he can think of for the unexpected windfall is to buy a couple of 19th century first editions by Richard Francis Burton. Few people around the world are ready to pay this kind of money for old paper, so Janeway enjoys a few days of local fame on the radio and TV circuits, followed by several weeks of phone calls from all kinds of freaks and crooks trying to sell him fakes. One of those calls though leads up to the third criminal case for the Bookman.From his bookstore in Denver, to the suburbs of Baltimore then down south to the port of Charleston, Janeway is tracking the theft of a unique collection of Burton first editions that took place eight decades ago, all because of a promise he makes by the death bed of a very old lady. One may think that 80 years is more than enough time for the tracks to get cold and for all the clues to disappear, yet somebody is apparently ready to kill to preserve the secret of the missing books. Among the suspects are a cranky author with writer's block and a pair of second hand booksellers with ties to the mob.Cliff Janeway has a strong sense of honour and integrity, but he is also in the chase for personal reasons, mostly having to do with collector fever, like a bloodhound catching the scent of prey. And what a prey this is - one of the most controversial and intriguing personalities of Victorian England, Captain Sir Richard Francis Burton: explorer, geographer, translator, writer, soldier, orientalist, cartographer, ethnologist, spy, linguist, poet, fencer, and diplomat. Famous for travelling incognito to Mecca and Medina, for fighting over with Speke over who first discovered first the source of the Nile, indecent translator of Kama Sutra, The Arabian Nights and other Oriental sex manuals, Burton did manage to include in his busy schedule a trip to America right before the start of the Civil War, to meet with the Mormon leaders and to cross the praerie. Dunning focuses on the missing three months from the accounts of Burton's visit to America, and the historical mystery manages to often dominate the criminal case Janeway is building, although the two will probably prove to be related in the end. He was one of those brilliant swashbuckling wizards who comes along rarely, who understands life and writes exactly what he sees without pandering to rules of propriety or knuckling under to religious tyranny. His kind does not have an easy life. He is resented and shunned by churches and genteel society; if he's lucky, he may escape being burned at the stake. In Burton's case, he was victimized after death by his pious, narrow-minded Roman Catholic wife. Lady Isabel torched his work, burning forty years of unpublished manuscripts, journals, and notes in her mindless determination to purify his image.This is why I am not religious. John Dunning talks about books in much the same way Dick Francis talks about his beloved horses and the racing world. He talks about the subject professionally and passionately, with many secret details about the publishing secret clues on the first editions he sells and with intriguing bits of trivia from the life of Burton. In another parallel with Francis, Janeway is cast in the role of the quiet, but strong career man who confronts a band of ruthless thugs, yet finds time for a little romance along the route. A new woman enters into his life, although holding on to her proves to be a tricky job when Cliff tries to play the protective, dominating male and her feminist hackles rise to the ceiling. I remembered half a dozen moments in my life, crossroads where everything would be different if I had gone the other way. I could tick them off in no particular order. When I became a cop. When I stopped being a cop. When I doscovered Hemingway and Fowles and those three lovely books by Maugham, all in the same month. When I became a bookseller. When I found, won, and lost an unforgettable woman. Now this. Suddenly my world was shaken. Everything in it was different. You gotta love a guy who mentions among the defining moments of his life the books he read before he comes to the subject of his love life. Of course, Janeway can also boast of his young thug life on the streets of Denver and of his hardboiled police experience when it comes to dealing with the criminal underworld, but for me the ultimate fascination with the Bookman series remains in the literary references and in the discovery of new reading subjects for my own shelves: ... there are many quieter thrills in the book world. The bottomless nature of it. The certainty of surprise, even for a specialist. The sudden enlightenment, the pockets of history that can open without warning and turn a bookman towards new fields of passionate interest. Wasn't that what had just happened with me and Richard Burton? For example, in mentioning the upheaval brought by the internet and by quick referencing tools to the industry of selling rare and second hand books, Janeway insists on the continuing relevance of the human insight and of the old fashioned methods of study: A book is a mirror. If an ass peers into it, you can't expect an apostle to look out. That was written two centuries ago by a German wit named Lichtenberg, but I think the same applies today to a computer screen. From this epigram, I went myself to the quick wikipedia reference library and discovered that Lichtenberg was as famous in his own way as Burton, although in the field of experimental physics and skeptical thinking rather than for adventuring and translating risque ancient tomes. I now have another name to add to my ever increasing wishlist of authors and books: Georg Christoph Lichtenberg (1 July 1742 – 24 February 1799) was a German scientist, satirist, and Anglophile. As a scientist, he was the first to hold a professorship explicitly dedicated to experimental physics in Germany. Today, he is remembered for his posthumously published notebooks, which he himself called Sudelbücher, a description modelled on the English bookkeeping term "scrapbooks", and for his discovery of the strange tree-like electrical discharge patterns now called Lichtenberg figures. [...]Arthur Schopenhauer admired Lichtenberg greatly for what he had written in his notebooks. He called Lichtenberg one of those who "think ... for their own instruction", who are "genuine 'thinkers for themselves' in both senses of the words". Other admirers of Lichtenberg's notebooks include Friedrich Nietzsche, Sigmund Freud and Ludwig Wittgenstein. Lichtenberg is not read by many outside Germany. Leo Tolstoy held Lichtenberg's writings in high esteem, expressing his perplexity of "why the Germans of the present day neglect this writer so much." [...] In the spirit of enlightenment, he strove to educate the common people to use logic, wit and the power of their own senses. ... and that's the way shelves are populated with books: from the Bookman to Burton to Lichtenberg to Wittgentstein to who knows where else. It's what makes reading and book collecting interesting and why I will read the next Cliff Janeway mystery.