KEEPING THE BOOKS

by Melodie Johnson Howe

Last month when the Zaca fire raged near where we live an eerie orange glow enveloped us as if w’d been captured in amber. As ash poured down like dirty rain I began to think what I would take with me if we had to evacuate. Some female friends said they would take family photographs. Family photos? Most of my photos are in a big drawer that I haven’t looked at for months. (Maybe a year.) I knew what I would take. Books.

My choice made me aware of how important books are to me. They are piled on the floor in the bedroom. In the living room they are stacked on tables with vases on top of them. It saves space that way. A lot of these books are interior design books. I love to peruse the lush photographs of other people’s rooms. Admire the tassels on the pillows and the glittering china on the dining table. These books fill my voyeuristic needs. I am on the outside of the window looking in. Just where a writer should be. One of my favorite books of this ilk is a table top book on how to live with dogs. On every page is a perfect dog in a perfect room. There is not one stain on any chair in the photographs. It’s a snobby book that implies that the reader is not living as well as the dogs are in these elegant homes. I love it.

I wrote a play called the Lady of the House that was produced in Los Angeles. It’s about a mother and daughter battling over their possessions. In it the mother announces that, “décor is a necessity.” I give those lush picture books credit for helping me create her character.

Then there is my small collection of first edition crime novels and a few others that are not related to the genre. They define my life more than anything else in my home. Yet they are tucked away on shelves barely noticeable. They are why I am sitting here writing this blog. They are what got me published in Ellery Queen. They helped make me a writer. Rex Stout, S. S. Van Dine, Dorothy Sayers, Edmund Crispin, Ross Macdonald, Raymond Chandler, Cyril Hare, Michael Innes and many others. I’ve often thought that my Detective Claire Conrad in The Mother Shadow and Beauty Dies is Lord Peter Wimsey in drag.

Then there are the quirky books that just simply delight me. The Spy’s Bedside Book edited by Graham Greene and Hugh Green. In it they give an example of invisible writing — a blank page. Hilarious. Also The Murder Book by Tage La Cour and Haraold Mogensen. It’s an illustrative history of the detective story. It has wonderfully macabre Victorian drawings and etchings all the way up to the time of black and white movie stills. The book captures how the media and the crime stories of each era perfectly melded. It also includes the famous photograph of Edgar Wallace with the longest cigarette holder in history. As Freud might say, sometimes a cigarette holder is just a cigarette holder. There is a dour E. C. Bentley (Trent’s Last Case) explaining why he doesn’t like Sherlock Holmes — too rich in character, to many Victorian eccentricities, and too serious. Funny how contemporary writers and their detectives have gone back to the Victorian contrivances. Monk, anyone?

I have the first editions of W. Somerset Maugham’s autobiography The Summing Up and his journal A Writers Notebook. Every writer, and anyone who wants to write, should read both. He captures the writing life with a gimlet eye, sharp observations, passion, and humor. On his 70th birthday he wrote that he talked to no one, dined alone, and went to bed with a mystery novel. He said he wouldn’t have had it any other way. He also said that he didn’t want to relive his life again because it would be a little like rereading a detective novel. He’d know how it ended.

Yes, I would take all my books even though I know how they end.