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Ancient Oz books with colored plates. Rows of Nancy Drews and Bobbsey Twins. WINNIE THE POOH keeping company with ALICE and MARY POPPINS. I love wandering among shelves of antiquarian books, craning my neck until I need a chiropractic adjustment. Shopping for the latest reads is one thing; the collectors' circuit is quite another. It is all about the quest --- which, if children's books are your passion (they're mine), can be a real journey into the past.
So I was enchanted to find that a collection of juvenilia (as they call it in the book biz) figures in THE BOOKWOMAN'S LAST FLING, the most recent of John Dunning's witty, literate mysteries. For this outing, though, Dunning gallops into Dick Francis territory: horse racing. (If you don't know Francis's work, get thee to Amazon immediately --- since 1962 this gifted Brit has written 38 tense, economical thrillers, always in an equestrian setting, that are enthralling whether or not you've ever sat on a horse, or bet on one. His 39th is slated for a September release.) Dunning, it seems, worked at racetracks before he became a bookseller and writer, and here he uses that insider info to add a new sort of local color to the page-turning adventures of Cliff Janeway --- former cop, book dealer, and now book detective.
The story begins in Idaho, where celebrated horse owner and trainer H.R. Geiger has just died. His estate can't be settled until the book collection of his late wife, Candice, has been assessed. Enter Janeway, who discovers cheaper reprints cropping up among her priceless, mint-condition first editions (Dunning's descriptions of these, especially the children's stuff, are wonderfully juicy), suggesting theft and hasty substitutions. As is his habit, Janeway soon expands his mandate to an investigation of her mysterious death 20 years earlier. (Was she murdered by someone aware of her fatal allergy to peanuts?) Although Candice seems to have cast a spell over everyone she met, her marriage to this much older man was not happy; he, it seems, had potency problems --- hence her affairs and, ultimately, the "last fling" of the title.
Our hero's search for the truth takes him to California, where he goes undercover as a racetrack employee and is almost killed for his trouble several times (including one hair-raising sequence in which Janeway, locked in the trunk of a car, hears the villain sloshing gasoline on the vehicle as he prepares to torch it). You won't guess the culprit, but here's a clue: It has to do with the difference between bibliophilia (which I, and no doubt you, have in spades) and bibliomania (the compulsion to acquire books by any means necessary and hoard rather than love or read them --- the foundations of one bibliomaniac's house actually cracked under the weight of his accumulated stacks).
Dunning has a gift for building characters: not only Janeway himself, with his physicality, brains and intrinsic sense of justice, but also Candice's daughter, Sharon, an heiress-with-a-cause who rescues doomed horses, and any number of colorful individuals at her ranch and around the racetrack. (I adored Martha, a gritty would-be writer and racetrack freelancer who may have been inspired by the author's own life.) Those who have read the earlier books may wonder if Erin, Cliff Janeway's lawyer girlfriend, is still around --- yes, she is, and she does play a (smallish) role in the proceedings. But although Dunning's dialogue is usually terrific, the banter between Cliff and Erin --- he, wry and pugnacious; she, protective and prickly --- seemed to me a bit forced and self-conscious this time around.
There are also a couple of problems with pace and balance. The novel begins, for example, with a 45-page conversation between Janeway and the unpleasant guy who initially employs him: It's an atypically awkward, wordy way to establish Janeway's character and lay out the fundamentals of the plot. As for the racetrack angle, I think the detail Dunning lavishes on the care and feeding of horses, although interesting, is a bit excessive, and doesn't necessarily advance or enhance the story. The book part and the horse part of THE BOOKWOMAN'S LAST FLING jostle along in an uneasy, not altogether plausible partnership.
Despite these lapses, Dunning still takes the reader for a helluva good ride. My favorite moment: Janeway is staking out a restaurant where Martha, wearing a wire, is meeting a murder suspect. Killing time in a nearby thrift store, he finds a rare, possibly valuable mystery by John D. MacDonald on the shelf. Before he can buy it (for 75 cents!) the bad guy leaves the restaurant and Janeway has to follow. When he goes back the next day, the book is gone. The tension between a quiet, bookish existence and a life of action and intrigue could not be more perfectly embodied --- and it's a tension that Dunning, at the end of the book, sets up in Janeway's own character, as he wrestles with his recurrent desire to be a cop again.
Dunning fans won't be disappointed by THE BOOKWOMAN'S LAST FLING. And since there are a lot of horse lovers out there, perhaps with this venture into equestrian territory, he will corral a few new admirers.
--- Reviewed by Kathy Weissman
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