Book number 59 of 2024
The Haunted Bookshop is the sequel to Parnassus On Wheels, which I reviewed here. That book was the quirky and fun tale of a middle-aged farmwoman, Helen McGill, who left her farm and brother to sell books to other rural folk from a mobile, horse-drawn bookstore. The theme of the novel was that anyone can appreciate a good book, given the opportunity. Roger Mifflin was the eccentric little man who sold her the bookstore, named Parnassus.
Roger and Helen return in The Haunted Bookshop, happily married and running a bookshop called Parnassus at Home on Gissing Street, in Brooklyn. There is sign explaining why it’s haunted:
This shop is haunted by the ghosts
Of all great literature, in hosts;
We sell no fakes or trashes.
Lovers of books are welcome here,
No clerks will babble in your ear,
Please smoke— but don’t drop ashes!Christopher Morley. The Haunted Bookshop (Kindle Locations 69-73). Standard Ebooks. Kindle Edition.
It is filled to the ceiling with used books, and Roger hosts meetings of fellow booksellers from all over New York City. One evening, a young ad salesman, Aubrey Gilbert, stops in to see if Roger would be interested in running ads for his store. Roger declines, but invites him to stay for dinner, since Helen is staying with family in Boston. They hit it off, and Aubrey mentions that one of his accounts is for Chapman’s Daintybits Prunes. George Chapman is also a book lover, who has asked Roger to give his daughter, Titania, a job in his bookshop so she can learn what real life is like. She has been to finishing school, so as a result knows nothing!
While Roger and Aubrey are having a leisurely meal, a customer comes in, asking for a copy of Carlyle’s Cromwell. Roger is sure he has a copy, but when he goes to where it should be, it isn’t there. A little later, while he is dusting the shelves, there is the copy of Cromwell, right where it should be! Meanwhile, Helen returns from Boston and Titania arrives. The Mifflins have fixed up the spare room for her, and she is delighted to begin a career “in literature”. Roger tells Helen about the case of the Cromwell, and when he goes to show her, it’s gone again! Titania picks up the New York Times, and in the Lost and Found section there is this ad:
Lost – Copy of Thomas Carlyle’s Oliver Cromwell between Gissing Street, Brooklyn, and the Octagon Hotel. If found before midnight, Tuesday, Dec. 3, return to assistant chef, Octagon Hotel.
That evening, Aubrey stops by to tell Roger about the ad and the fact that he dined at the Octagon with George Chapman. He also mentions that when he was in the elevator, a chef got in, carrying a copy of Cromwell! Aubrey also meets the beautiful Titania, with predictable results.
Thus begins an entertaining mystery involving a strange copy of Carlyle’s Cromwell, messages sent via Lost and Found notices, and other odd occurrences. Aubrey finds himself a target of a dastardly gang of German spies hellbent on blowing up President Woodrow Wilson as he travels to Europe to negotiate the peace. Meanwhile, Titania enjoys working at the Haunted Bookshop enormously, even if she is blissfully unaware of the danger she is in.
While the plot of The Haunted Bookshop is an improvement over that of Parnassus On Wheels, in The Haunted Bookshop Morley has an unfortunate tendency to use characters to expound his personal opinions to the reader. The Haunted Bookshop was published in 1919, immediately after the World War I Armistice, and Morley certainly had strong feelings about how that conflict occurred and how the peace should be concluded. That’s understandable, but to have Roger Mifflin pontificate for paragraph after paragraph gets tiresome. Morley even devotes an entire chapter to a letter Roger writes in which he expresses his admiration for books, booksellers, and President Wilson, and the role they will play in the new world that is certain to arise from the ashes of The Great War. I found myself wanting Morley to get back to the story at hand, because it was a pretty good one.
On balance, The Haunted Bookshop isn’t a profound work by any stretch of the imagination, but it is a fairly fun adventure tale. It’s too bad that whenever things start to get interesting, Morley chooses to veer off into opinionating. Parnassus On Wheels is the better novel, and you won’t be missing much if you skip this one.
FracTad's Bookshelf 