The Book Detective
It was a hot night in the city. I was sitting in my office practising for the do-nothing Olympics. The only thing on my desk was my pair of size ten spats and the only case I had handled recently was that little wooden number containing my favourite type of Scotch. The free kind, natch. That's what happens when clients pay you in booze instead of bucks. So who's complaining?
"I hope I'm not interrupting you?"
The voice was familiar. It took me three, maybe four seconds to swivel round but by then I had her pegged. She was that dame from the radio show. She had more class than a ten storey High School and more brains than a vat full of haggis. I pulled my feet off the desk and gave her the kind of attention that you couldn't divide with three calculators and a room full of Math majors.
"So what can I do for you? A drink maybe?"
She shook her head and then cut to the chase faster than an old Keystone Cops flick.
"I'm looking for books," she told me, "special books...lost books. I need you to find them. There's a lot of people depending on me and I need your help."
I poured myself another slug of Highland fire-water and sighed. It was the old sob story and I had heard a thousand just like it: some poor sap looking for a book that meant so much to him when he was a kid. Or else the devoted wife searching for that out-of-print novel for an unhappy husband. The experts called it the J.R. Hartley syndrome but that meant nothing to me. The books I knew about were the kind you worked out down at the race track.
But there was something about this radio dame that made me think twice. So what if it was another hard-luck story? Maybe, just maybe, it was the kind of case I could crack faster than the spine on a new paperback.
"Will you help me?" she asked.
"Stay tuned, " I told her, "and tell me more. I'm a good listener."
She smiled.
"I like good listeners", she said, and I knew she meant it.
The Book Detectives - launching next month in the 91Èȱ¬ Radio Scotland Book Cafe . It wont be anything like this.
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