The novel I’d been searching for over the past thirty years certainly wasn’t a classic. Not, at least, in the sense that Mrs. Earla Armstrong had meant. (Mrs. A read Pride and Prejudice and Emma at her desk during lunch hour while sipping coffee laced with gin out of an enormous black thermos.) The book I was looking for was a comic novel about a Canadian con man, set during World War I and the Great Depression. I’d loved it, just roared over page after page, but I had loaned it to my mother-in-law, who loaned it to a schoolteacher friend, who passed it along to someone else, and do you think that I could remember either the title or the author? My search for that damn novel had, over the years, turned into a quest, and if every journey is to some extent informed by a private agenda quite different from its stated purpose, my private agenda on the Great American Book Tour was to find that con-man story.
What better places to look than the great independent bookstores I was visiting, sometimes several a day? Not that I really expected to find the book. The search had become an end in itself, a perfect excuse to haunt the fiction sections of bookstores, new and used, and libraries, small and large. While I love to write, and can do so almost anywhere and under almost any circumstances, like many other writers of my acquaintance, I live to read. There’s no place I’d rather hang out than a bookstore or library.
I didn’t find the con-man novel in the extensive fiction section of 192 Books in New York City, where I had a terrific event on the evening after my visit to the Catskills. Or in the public library on Fifth Avenue, where the marble lions kept their own counsel and were of no help to me at all. Nobody at Chester County Book and Music, the wonderful indie on the western outskirts of Philadelphia, had heard of it, though my bookseller friend Michael Fortney suggested that after I got home from my tour, I should send a summary of the story to the book-search Web site ABE.com and see what I could find out.
No luck at Baltimore’s fine Ivy Bookshop or at the world-famous Politics and Prose Bookstore and Coffeehouse in Washington. Just good, lively book discussions at every indie on my itinerary, and several copies of my latest book sold at each store. Right now I was walking along the dusky side streets of Washington, trying to remember where I’d left the Loser Cruiser, when, hello, what’s this? In the gutter near a speed bump, I noticed a green Vermont license plate: my own. Evidently the plate had fallen off earlier that evening.
Nearby a tow truck was bellying up to my ancient Chevy. Two burly men with shaved heads, resembling nothing so much as a World Wrestling Federation tag team, got out and eyed the Cruiser. “There’s hardly enough left of her to hook onto,” one of them remarked.
“Excuse me,” I called out. “That’s my car. Is it parked illegally?”
“It’s abandoned illegally,” the larger tag team member said. “No license plate.”
I waved the battered plate I’d salvaged from the gutter. “It fell off. Back up the street.”
The guys continued to search for a place sufficiently rust-free to attach the tow hook.
“For God’s sake,” I said. “I’m a novelist from Vermont. Out on a book tour. I’ve been signing books at the store around the corner.”
And I will be hornswoggled if the head WWF brother didn’t unhook my car, straighten up, grin at me, and say, “Oh, Politics and Prose? Why didn’t you say so? My wife and I buy all our books there. Have for years. What’s the name of yours?”