An unexpected and exciting bag of books from secondhandbooksindia dot com … Nero Wolfe and hardboiled masters …

That The Hindu Literary Review of 18^th February 2018 has truly set off a chain of book buys.  Though this search on secondhandbooksindia started with Rex Stout’s Nero Wolfe novels, one search led to another author and yet another author I ended up with eight delectable novels. 

Though not always having stocks of books of my chosen authors, secondhandbooksindia has occasionally offered me some very good books.  I bought my first stack of John D. Macdonald novels from this seller, and also my first Simon Brett novels; and I also was lucky to land a most valuable author-signed copy of Ian Rankin’s The Impossible Dead.  Many a time have I visited this site and returned empty handed, but I continue to visit regularly.  I was rewarded this time … sumptuously …       

Rex Stout’s Nero Wolfe novels became my latest target as I searched online for them.  Lots of books were available, but most of them were new and expensive and I didn’t want to buy a ‘new’ Nero Wolfe novel yet.  I searched for used copies on my usual used-books portals on amazon, but no luck.  In the meantime, to lower the tension, I read the ebook of the first in the series, Fer-de-Lance and got a feel of the characters and setting.  And thus, with all my usual avenues closed, I thought I’d try my luck at secondhandbooksindia. 

I actually found 4 Nero Wolfe novels on secondhandbooksindia!!  I wanted to cross check the titles with the Rex Stout bibliography for chronology, and saw that while The Golden Spiders, Three Men Out, and Some Buried Caesar were in the list, Silver Spire was absent.  I was a bit puzzled and checked the book details again.  It said Silver Spire was a Nero Wolfe novel, but the author was Robert Goldsborough!  A little bit of snooping revealed that Goldsborough continued the Nero Wolfe series after Stout’s death with the approval of the estate of Rex Stout and he wrote 12 Nero Wolfe novels.  Let me read the originals first, I thought, and then find my way to the ‘official pastiches.’  And so, I put The Golden Spiders, Three Men Out, and Some Buried Caesar in my shopping basket.  During this snooping, I was happy to discover that Three Men Out contained 3 Nero Wolfe short stories.

I was pleased with this little triumph.  And since I was there anyway, I thought let me do my customary search for books of my favourite authors.  I typed ‘macdonald’ to account for both Ross and John D.  There were the usual Flashman novels by George MacDonald Fraser and other non-Travis McGee novels of John D. MacDonald.  Chal, jaan-de bhai, I thought as I scrolled down and there was a link to page 2 … hmmm … going to page 2? … a rare occurrence on the macdonald page … I went to page 2 and found two Ross Macdonald novels listed there!!  uhooooo … this is great … and also one Travis McGee novel by John D. MacDonald, The Quick Red Fox, which I didn’t have … Ross Macdonald had written 4 novels before he started writing his iconic Lew Archer series, and he wrote these using his real name Kenneth Millar … Trouble Follows Me is one of them … the other Ross Macdonald novel I got was Sleeping Beauty … I already have a copy of the novel, but I was going to get both of them, for it is not every day that you get a Ross Macdonald for 150 and odd rupees … and of course, in went John D. MacDonald’s The Quick Red Fox too … 

While all this surprise and happiness was going on, I realized I hadn’t checked the balance in my account on the site.  This site either gives you the option of using a cheque or internet banking or by depositing money in your cash basket on the site.  I prefer the cash basket mode, but my basket was empty.  I quickly put some money into my basket and it was activated almost immediately. 

The finding of Ross Macdonald novels had energized me.  I typed ‘chandler’ and what … there were two Chandlers that I didn’t have The Lady in the Lake and Playback … this is a golden hard-boiled run I am having I thought … I had 8 books, all of them desirable and welcome additions to my library … 

A Hammett would have rounded off the purchase nicely … there was one actually, but I had that title already … aah, well, maybe I should have put that too in the basket, after all I had a copy of Sleeping Beauty, and still bought this one here … 

After all the serendipities … a little bit more … meet a budding antiquarian book collector …

While that serendipitous Sunday ended with ‘absolute clarity,’ I was also aware that with absolute clarity comes absolute responsibility … yeah … and so, feeling all responsible, I went to my shopping cart … I had the three Hari Majestic novels, I had The Book Hunters of Katpadi … I also had Umberto Eco’s Chronicles of a Liquid Society … it was simple actually … I would go for all these books as these were the ones that grabbed my attention through those reviews and articles …

But as it turned out finally, things changed mid-way and I ended up not buying the Hari Majestic novels this time  … though expensive, I felt strongly about Umberto Eco’s Chronicles of a Liquid Society … this being his last book and so I decided to buy it … and I realized I was on an Eco trip when I started browsing other essay collections by Eco … I was interested in Faith in Fakes: Travels in Hyper-reality and Inventing the Enemy: Essays on Everything,  but settled for Faith in Fakes … this was an unanticipated buy and out went responsible buying …

While browsing books by Eco, for no reason at all, amazon kept ‘recommending’ other sort of ‘similar’ books … Patrick Suskind’s The Pigeon kept flying across my face much too often … his earlier novel Perfume was intriguing and outstanding … I had read the novel, and was fascinated … and also saw the movie based on it … so, the author was ‘tried and tested’ … I said yes to The Pigeon … feeling less and less responsible now …

The Book Hunters of Katpadi?  This book I wanted to buy and read … desperately, actually … as I wrote in my previous post, “… somewhere I knew that if at all anybody wrote a bibliomystery in India in English, it would be Pradeep Sebastian” … it was as if I was waiting for this book even before it was written … 

After the books arrived, I read a couple of essays in Chronicles of a Liquid Society and before long I was away for five days … visited Mangalore and Shimoga last week, actually … after I returned I picked up The Book Hunters of Katpadi … I am reading it very very slowly … mystery apart, it is a treat for those who are passionate about collecting books and making books (book making?) … all about antiquarian books, sellers, rivalries between collectors, papers, letter press, founts, binding … I have crossed a hundred pages and I can say that beneath the mystery flows a narrative of book collecting and books making in India …

But what warmed my heart was this passage right at the beginning … this is narrated by Kayal, the young associate of Neela, the owner of Biblio in Chennai, India’s first full-fledged antiquarian bookshop … Kayal is putting together a catalogue of modern Indian first editions and working out the tricky business of identifying them and then this comes as an example …

As I came to the bottom of the page, I rushed to my bookshelf and pulled out … very very gently … my Rupa paperback copy of English, August … I had read this novel many many times, lent it to friends and now I was wondering if the copy I had was the 1988 edition … I opened the copyrights page and saw the year … and it is …. yesss …. it is 1988!!!

I am already getting this heady feeling that I am a bona fide antiquarian book collector …