Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, June 4, 1995 TAG: 9506020030
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 5 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: JOE WHEELAN ASSOCIATED PRESS
DATELINE: DENVER LENGTH: Medium
Like his 1992 Janeway mystery, ``Booked to Die,'' Dunning's second books-and-murder excursion, ``The Bookman's Wake'' (Scribner), is a pleasurably suspenseful journey laced with plenty of book lore. The quest for the rare ``Raven'' is a fast-paced treasure hunt played out in Seattle's rainy streets, a shift from the Denver setting of ``Booked to Die.''
Dunning, a former antiquarian bookstore owner and ex-newspaper reporter, said in an interview that for plot reasons, he had to send Janeway somewhere, and he knows and likes Seattle. ``It couldn't be Denver again,'' he said.
Janeway leaves his peaceful Denver bookstore when a swaggering former colleague from Janeway's Denver Police Department days lays out an intriguing proposal. He offers Janeway $5,000 to pick up a young woman in Seattle who broke into a home in Taos, N.M. - and far more if he can recover the copy of ``The Raven'' she allegedly stole.
The book, published by the legendary Grayson Press, doesn't exist in any bibliography; the Grayson brothers died in a fire near Seattle in 1969, the same year the book supposedly was printed.
Janeway doesn't believe the book exists at first, but, fascinated by the Grayson legacy, he goes to Seattle anyway and finds everything tinged with ambiguity and danger.
There is a sinister private detective named Pruitt who is so adept at shadowing people that he is nicknamed ``Darkman.'' There are the loyal former Grayson assistants who worshipfully guard the flame of the brothers' memory, and the savvy newswoman who wrote a book about the brothers and has some intriguing theories about how they lived and died.
And frightened, young Eleanor Rigby, the woman Janeway is assigned to escort back to Taos, has secrets of her own and turns out to be a kindred spirit when it comes to books. She and Janeway embark on a memorable day-long book-scouting odyssey through Seattle's used bookstores before he loses her on the way to the airport.
A serial killer in hiatus for 20 years begins his bloody work again, and the race to find the ``Raven'' converges with the mystery behind the master craftsman who supposedly published it. The climax is as satisfying as the chase leading to it.
Dunning, a skilled weaver of dialogue, suspense and plot, generously dispenses book tradecraft throughout ``Bookman's Wake,'' describing how to identify a first edition, the ins and outs of small-time fine book publishing and the idiosyncratic pricing of used books.
Readers become acquainted with book scouting's visceral rewards, too:
``Book scouting gives you the same kinds of thrills as gambling. You flirt with the lady in much the same way. You get hot and the books won't stop coming: you get cold and you might as well be playing pinochle with your mother-in-law.''
Dunning, 52, an expert on rare books who got out of the bookstore business to spend more time writing, does most of his work beginning at 4 a.m. behind a 1964 Hermes manual typewriter.
``I find it the best time creatively,'' he said. ``I believe most of the book is written subconsciously, when the heart isn't beating and the coffee isn't bubbling yet.''
Dunning is an aficionado of old-time radio. He has a library of 35,000 programs from the Golden Age of Radio that he plays on his Sunday night Denver radio show.
His show-by-show encyclopedia of network radio from 1926 to 1962, ``Tune in Yesterday,'' is due from Oxford University Press next year.
by CNB