Hound
Vincent McCaffrey
Small Beer Press, 2009
U.S. trade paper, reprint
ISBN 978-93152025-6
280 pages; $16.00

Any novel that features someone in the book business solving a mystery is likely to appeal to a biblioholic, and Hound is no exception. Vincent McCaffrey, the owner of Victor Hugo Books in Boston (formerly an excellent bricks-and-mortar bookshop that provided hours of browsing fun, now, alas, an internet-only business), uses his knowledge of the used book trade to great effect. Put this volume on the shelf alongside John Dunning’s Cliff Janeway series and Carolyn G. Hart’s Death on Demand books and create a biblio-heaven for the mystery buff.

Henry sells used books on the internet, but only to other dealers so as to avoid tax problems. He doesn’t make a lot of money, but he makes enough to be comfortable in his small apartment in one of Boston’s classier neighborhoods, in a house built while John Quincy Adams was president. Henry is single, but a few years ago he had an affair with Morgan Johnson, a woman then married to a man a good many years her elder, and in poor health. Morgan ultimately found that her conscience would not allow her to sustain the affair. Henry was heartbroken; even though Morgan was a number of years his senior, he loved her.

Heber Johnson, Morgan’s husband, spent his career as a literary agent for some of the most prominent American authors of the twentieth century. When Hound opens, Heber has recently died. Morgan resurfaces from the past to ask Henry to value the most personal portion of Heber’s library: those books that were inscribed to him by his clients. It’s an amazing collection, as McCaffrey describes it. Anyone with his or her own collection of twentieth century first editions is likely to salivate at the description, despite McCaffrey’s inclusion of a couple of fictional authors.

The appointment for the appraisal of the books turns physical, as Morgan and Henry pay a brief, tender visit to their past together. That is why it is all the more gut-wrenching when the police show up at Henry’s door the next day and drag him in for questioning regarding Morgan’s murder. Henry is not content to leave finding the perpetrator to the police, and he follows the clues left in the Johnsons’ library to attempt to discover the truth on his own.

Even while he is working to solve this mystery, Henry is also preoccupied by a mystery from the past. His friend, Albert, runs a salvage operation often called into a home after the death of the owners to clear it out and prepare it for sale. One home yields a cache of bestsellers from the earliest years of the twentieth century, all in near mint condition. Along with the books is a pile of letters written by a young woman who, uncharacteristically for the time, explored Europe on her own while in her 20s. Henry tries to find out what happened to her, and how and why her library came to be walled up in an old house.

Much of Hound turns on the hazard of the estate tax (otherwise known as the inheritance tax), which I found puzzling. In 2009, when this book was copyrighted, the first $3.5 million of any estate was exempt from federal taxation, and the first $1 million exempt from taxation by the State of Massachusetts. Although Heber’s children are in somewhat desperate need of money, it seems unlikely that $1 million wouldn’t cover their problems. And the estate, though clearly sizable, doesn’t seem likely to exceed $3.5 million in value. But perhaps this is a problem only for bookworms who are also lawyers, and won’t give pause to any other reader.

The book lore contained in this novel is great fun. I happened to read it just a day or two before attending the Sacramento Book Fair, and was pleased to come across a number of first editions by Earl Stanley Gardner, just as described in Hound. I enjoyed the discussion of such things as the relative merits of authors like John Updike and Tom Wolfe and the diminishment of the once-proud literary establishment into a business so strongly tied to the profits made in the current quarter that good authors aren’t given the time to build an audience. For me, this type of detail was the best reason to read the book; the mystery was nice, but secondary.

This quiet book isn’t for those who want a thrill on every page. Nor is it for the reader of classic mysteries who want a scrupulously fair mystery that allows him or her to solve the puzzle before the author reveals the identity of the culprit. But for those of us who love books about books, this is a vital addition to our personal libraries.