Read The Paperback Show Murders Online

Authors: Robert Reginald

Tags: #General Fiction, #Mystery, #murder, #books, #convention, #paperbacks

The Paperback Show Murders

BOOK: The Paperback Show Murders
10.6Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads
COPYRIGHT INFORMAtION

Copyright © 2011 by Robert Reginald

Published by Wildside Press LLC

www.wildsidebooks.com

DEDICATION

To the memory of my dear friend,

Allan Aaron Adrian

(23 January 1931 - 4 October 2009)

Bookhound extraordinaire
;

Also for
Doug Menville
and
Barry Levin
,

And our now ancient adventures

Trolling Booksellers' Row in Hollywood;

And to all the eccentric proprietors of all the

Odd little bookshops that I've encountered

Over the years—most of them, lamentably,

Now permanently out-of-print.

AUTHOR'S NOTE

There's no resemblance intended, of course, between the Fiftieth Paperback Exposition and Show at Santo Verdugo, California, and the Annual Paperback Collectors Show & Sale at Mission Hills, California, although Mary and I have enjoyed our occasional presence at the latter. None of the invented authors or bookmongers or attendees featured herein are intended to mimic, mock, or resemble any real authors or bookmongers, save for the late Donald A. Wollheim and Evelyn Grippo, both of whom I knew and respected a great deal. Indeed, I regard Don as my paradigm as an editor. Finally, Santo Verdugo is
not
San Bernardino, California, and West Highlands is
not
Highland, California, despite certain geographical similarities. All of the invented excerpts from supposed vintage paperbacks are solely my creation, and you may cringe and/or laugh (or not), as you please.

—Robert Reginald

PROLOGUE

“JUST ANOTHER DEAD BODY”

Sunday, March 27

“The corpus was sprawled like a limp sack of spuds across the plastic counter, drizzled with mounds of condiments in a vain attempt to spruce up the offering. But I knew better: this was just another course in an endless meal sweetened with fatty promises, sugar, too much salt, and a plethora of empty calories.

“I stifled a belch of indifference, and farted. To me it was just another dead body!”

—
Just Another Dead Body
,

by Robert Z. Blayd (1955)

I'd just returned from my noon-time luncheon expedition when I heard the ruckus in the other room.

“Cripes, what is it this time?” I asked Margie, who was already charging through the Johnny-burger and fried onion rings I'd brought her.

“Just another dead body, I suspect,” she said, shaking her head. A piece of onion went swishing off into eternity.

I left my roast beef melt and iced tea where they wouldn't damage any of our stock, and snuck into the adjoining suite, the primo dealers' display area. The crowd was thickest at the back, where “The Last Word” was located, but I couldn't tell what was happening there.

So I pushed my way through the throng, shoving aside fans and authors alike, until I could see the focus of their attention.

Finally, I spotted Courtlandt Frederick van Noland, affectionately known to his enemies as “Freddie the Cur” (he had no friends), leaning precariously back against both chair and wall, his rotund belly resting on the edge of the table that featured his display of vintage paperbacks. It looked for a moment that he was sporting a particularly long pen in his left pocket, but it was actually stuck
through
his pocket. A crimson flower was already staining the garish Hawaiian motif of his shirt.

He was quite undeniably dead, poor old Fred, and no one seemed to care very much, either.

“Well, I guess someone finally wrote him out,” the well-known writer Noel G. Person said, chuckling at his semi-witticism. Person “wrote,” if one can actually apply the word to such an irrepressible hack, bodice-rippers as “Makayla Sturges,” SF space operas as “Cosmo Lund,” and serial killer thriller-chillers as “Patterson Bates.”

“Yes, they certainly canceled his subscription,” the horror writer Brand Garner said.

“He had it coming!” Levi Barton said. His dealer's table was located in the second room, the same one where I'd planted my flag.

“What's that in his left hand?” someone else asked.

Then I noticed a slim piece of paper protruding from between the dead man's clasped fingers. I looked at it more closely, but although I could tell it was a book of some sort, I couldn't make out the details.

“Why, it's the Bantam L.A. Burroughs!” Barton said, awe permeating his voice.

And no wonder! He was speaking of a bibliographic rarity issued by the short-lived company, Bantam Books of Los Angeles (not to be confused with the present publisher of that name). The West Coast Bantam was founded in 1939, and produced a short series of slim, 100-page paperbacks that sold for a dime through vending machines. It'd fallen victim in 1943 to the World War II paper shortages, and a decided lack of imagination in its cover designs.

All of the Bantam L.A. editions were rare, but the Edgar Rice Burroughs short with an illustrated cover, an abridged novel called
Tarzan in the Forbidden City
, was particularly collectible. I'd seen pictures of the book, and had sold one or two of the more common edition with the plain text covers; but had never actually encountered the pictorial version in the flesh, so to speak.

“I heard that a copy had surfaced recently,” Tomás Law, one of the organizers of the con, said, “but how did Freddie wind up with it?”

I looked at the book more closely. One of the near corners of the cover was creased. There was something peeking out from inside the pages. I dropped my head a little closer to his hand. What could it be?

And then I saw the blue words inked there. I reached out, pulled the tab away from the embracing text around it, and pocketed it.

I finally knew! I knew without a doubt who'd killed “Freddie the Cur,” Lissa “The Boa Constrictor” Boaz, and Brody Richard “The O-Man” Dameen.

But…who could ever prove it?

CHAPTER ONE

“IT'S A WOMAN!”

Friday, March 25

“There was a monster lurking in the shadows of the carousel, a creature of crinoline and calomel, a crux ansata of all that was cruel and capricious in the world. It was ready, willing, and able to grab and gobble the first human that came near enough to its tentacles to tickle its terrible toenails.

“Suddenly it lurched towards me, its twin peaks jutting out into the stark, raving light.

“‘It's a woman!' someone screamed—and I knew right then that this particular poltergeist wasn't going to be any pushover!”

—
The Devil's in the Details
,

by Bosco Wolfstein (1958)

The fiftieth Paperback Exposition and Show was touted as a grander version of the one-day event that sprang forth in Southern California with the advent of spring each year. The venue was completely new: a well-worn motel called The Royal Crest in south Santo Verdugo, California, a bad-boy town celebrating its bicentennial that year.

For the con's golden anniversary, the event would be spread over a three-day period, with many more signing sessions by many more writers. The brochure promised to resurrect some vintage authors who hadn't been seen in years (or decades, in a few cases).

The book dealers, of course, knew that the larger audience generated by these extra appearances would mean increased sales of their crumbling wares, the luridly dressed mass market paperbacks of the 1940s, '50s, and '60s. So, in spite of the recession, the three large display rooms quickly sold out. Margie and I were very lucky indeed to secure a back wall in Dealer Room B.

We'd put together some of our best offerings in years. I'd managed to assemble a complete run of the mid-1960s reprints of the forty-eight pulp magazine classics issued by Corinth Books, an imprint of the notorious (by the standards of the day) porn publisher, Greenleaf Books of San Diego. In “Near Mint” condition, these were well worth the $1,000 price I'd posted, and I had no doubt they'd sell very close to that level as a set.

Individual gems included Lambert Wilhelm's porn SF spoof,
Starship Intercourse
(priced at a cool grand all by its lonesome—and signed by the author!); Bob Silverstein's werewolf porn (I'd bumped that one up to $1,500); Halbert Ellender's first book and story collection (easily two thousand), and a very rare signed copy of his Bel-Tower SF double,
Dunebuddy
, which he routinely destroyed whenever he encountered a copy (another couple of
g
's); and so on. Ellender was supposed to be there himself on Saturday, so I'd have to hide the display whenever he appeared.

Each of the dealers was trying to outdo the others, bringing forth rarities that hadn't been seen at any of the recent cons. Business was brisk, right from the beginning.

Margie and I set up shop on Friday morning, March 25
th
, using a dolly to tote the plastic boxes of priceless paperbacks from our van. We always knew in advance exactly how to arrange the books to put our best sales face forward; and we always kept a few key titles in reserve for the subsequent days of the show.

Lissa Boaz had the table across the aisle and to the left of ours. She specialized in lesbian and women writers of the 1950s through '70s. “Spade” Samuels owned the display to our right, featuring vintage mysteries, including regular- and digest magazine-sized pbs from the 1940s and '50s.

“How're you doing, Margie?” Lissa purred from her metal chair. Of course, she'd rarely deign to talk directly to
me
, a mere male.

“We're just fine,” my partner said. “How about you?”

Lissa had a habit of twisting her neck back and forth whenever she was excited—all too frequently!—and then adjusting the bright pink boa that slithered around her copious bosoms and over her shoulders (she always tended to overdress in period frippery [which Margie called “frumpery”]).

“I
found
something!” she crooned—and then held up a copy of
The Secret of Castle Dred
, the first original gothic novel published by Ace Books back in the early 1960s. It was Ace's editor, the late Donald A. Wollheim, who'd invented the package that later became the standard dress for this newly rediscovered “genre.” A comely young woman was depicted fleeing in terror from an oversized house or castle lurking in the always dim background, with a single light blinking from an upper-story window.

At first Wollheim licensed various reprints of books published in the preceding decades, titles that could be warped (by a stretch of the [female] reader's imagination) into the gothic package—but soon the booming sales of the line demanded some original copy.

Of course, the notoriously tightfisted publisher, Heron Wynce, wouldn't pay a few dollars more for quality, so poor old Don, together with newly-hired editor Evelyn Grippo, was forced to turn to his usual stable of SF, mystery, and western writers (most of them men) to produce his new female-bylined gothics. One of the first of the original series was
Castle
Dred
, supposedly penned by one Twilla Curtayne, a southern belle living somewhere on an old plantation in the Carolinas (ya betcha!).

Although many of the gothic novelists had eventually emerged from the literary fog that initially shrouded their mostly trite offerings, and some of the writers were indeed of the male persuasion, occasionally with a dexter swish of the pen, Curtayne, the pioneer of the lot, had never stepped out from behind the silk curtain to reveal herself (or himself) for who—or what—she was. And she'd never penned another novel, so far as anyone knew.

“Just
what
did you find?” I asked Ms. Boaz, known in the trade as “The Boa Constrictor” for her barely legal business practices—and for her habit of wearing flamingo-hued boas.

“I've got a copy inscribed by the original author to her lover,” she almost whispered,
“and it's a woman!”

“Which,” I asked, “the writer or the fan?”


Curtayne
, of course!” she said. “Well, I guess the other one is too, come to think of it.”

I had to admit that that would
indeed
be a find, probably worthy of another grand or more to just the right buyer. Many fans had speculated on the biting, bitchy tone of Curtayne's mordant take on “Southern hospitality,” and the barely disguised lesbian confrontation between her over-endowed heroine, Jezebel Langtree, and her perpetual tormentor, the equally over-the-top Madame Montragora.

“Let me see!”
I said, leaning forward. She promptly rose to her feet and stepped back a pace, stashing the plastic-wrapped tome in the bowels of her oversized, alligator-encased handbag.

“No!”
she hissed. “I'll only show it to the author—the
real
author! And she's going to have to pay me a pretty penny to buy this one back, let me tell you.”

“Why
should
she?” I asked. “I mean, it's been more than forty years. Who really cares at this point?”

“Ohhh,”
Lissa said, drawing out the syllable, “I just have this little feelin', dawlin', that she'll make me an offer I just can't refuse. Ha, ha, ha—you don't know half of what
I
know.”

Then she opened the first page of the book, and read the inscription: “Look sharp, Dawlin': you'll find this lurkin' beneath your covers—right along with me! Love and kisses from Your One and Own-ly—Twilla, 2/11/64.”

She smirked then—I swear to God she smirked—and flounced that egregious piece of pink folderol that she always wore up around her neck and down her back, as she returned to her seat at her table.

“What was
that
all about?” Margie asked.

There wasn't much about paperbacks that Margie didn't know. She'd started as an editor at Charles N. Heckelmann's Monarch Books label in Derby, Connecticut, in the mid-1960s, and after the collapse of that line, slaved for some of the New York porn imprints of the 1960s and '70s. I'd known the woman for more than three decades, and we'd been peddling vintage paperbacks together for almost twenty years.

I told her what the “Boa Constrictor” had said.

“What a nasty piece of work that woman is,” she said. “Always trying to stir things up. I can't imagine
what
she thinks she's going to accomplish.”

“I think she wants to make a lot of money,” I said. “It's obvious to me that she believes this signed copy will fetch a pretty price in the right hands.”

“Well, I don't imagine that the original writer would want to see it surface,” Margie said. “I mean, if the poor woman were still alive, that is. She's probably long dead, you know. If it even
is
a woman.”

“As if I even care,” I said. I stifled a yawn.

“A
lot
of writers produced a
lot
of quickly-written crap for the sleaze and low-end paperback markets back then,” my partner said. “They needed the flat-fee money to put food on their tables. There were also some major authors that got their start in that part of the business, all the way through the end of the '70s. I don't look down on them.”

“I don't either, Margie,” I said, “but I also can't generate a great deal of interest at this point about who wrote what. I asked Wollheim once about the author behind
Castle Dred
, and he said that the writer had really needed the money, so he was able to buy it for a $500 flat fee, and not on a royalty basis. He chortled at the memory of the sharp deal that he'd made. But he also said that, although I'd know who the writer was if he mentioned the name, he'd made a pledge never to reveal it to anyone—and he hadn't—and he wouldn't. So that was that!”

“And now Lissa thinks she knows the secret?”

“One of these days, Lissa's going to dig herself a hole that's just a wee too deep,” I said, “and someone'll get angry enough to strangle her scrawny little neck with that garish scarf of hers.”

Then one of our prospective customers wanted to see the first of the Kurt Vonnegut original Gold Medals,
Canary in a Cat House
, the one with the beautiful Leo and Diane Dillon cover art, signed by the late master himself across the inside cover with a whimsical note, “My goodness! What a rarity!”

Which it certainly was! And for just a thousand cool ones, you could “share the rare” yourself!

BOOK: The Paperback Show Murders
10.6Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

Other books

Battleaxe by Sara Douglass
Deep Black by Stephen Coonts; Jim Defelice
Hunted by Karen Robards
Man Drought by Rachael Johns
Read Bottom Up by Neel Shah
Town in a Pumpkin Bash by B. B. Haywood
The RECKONING: A Jess Williams Western by Robert J. Thomas, Jill B. Thomas, Barb Gunia, Dave Hile
The Ace by Rhonda Shaw