The Bookman's Wake

by John Dunning, 351 pages, Scribner, 1995
Reviewed by Jim Stasiowski, April 9, 2020

For a very limited audience, this trite crime yarn may be appealing. If you’re an aficionado of rare books or the lore surrounding them, you may be mildly amused by a mystery that, not very nimbly, teaches some of the rudiments of being what is called a “bookman.” I am not part of that audience, and if you are, I still think you will be disappointed in this weak effort, the second in a series. If it’s the second and last, well, that’s fine with me.

Cliff Janeway is a former cop (already, it’s bordering on cliché, right?) who runs a rare-book store (hmmmm, veering away from cliché, maybe?) in Denver, but can’t resist when a former police colleague (whom Janeway can’t stand, so we know Janeway is a maverick, another cliché) offers him a quick payday if he’ll do what seems a shady-sounding (oh, brother, spare me; how can this possibly be legit?) errand in Seattle.

Janeway, of course, accepts, otherwise the book would have been a merciful eight pages. Everything goes wrong for a long time – too long – but the missteps allow us to involuntarily and painfully learn lots of complicated (translation: “boring”) stuff about rare books. Look, I love books, and rare books no doubt can be fascinating, but here, what is really rare is fascination.

The characters have as much depth as a kiddie pool, and speaking of water, one of the recurring plot elements is that rain often falls in Seattle and, for a twist, even in locales near Seattle. (Most of the fights – did I mention this is a crime novel? – take place outdoors, so the wet weather adds, you know, color, not to mention humidity.)

About the plot: The errand involves a charming young but obviously scheming (albeit not obvious to Janeway) woman who is in trouble; Janeway, the stereotypical older man (translation: “dupe”) in the stereotypical damsel-in-distress tale, tries to help her, but she disappears, perhaps as a result of foul play, but I never cared about her anyway, so as long as she is replaced by a more interesting woman – is it too much to ask that the replacement be a beautiful, smart newspaper reporter? – the story can muddle on. But the beautiful, smart newspaper reporter is yet another kiddie pool in a 351-page warehouse of them.

There are plenty of murders, plenty of treacheries involving rare books, plenty of suspects, but it turns out the real bad guy is someone who, as the novel trudges erratically in the direction of a climax, doesn’t emit so much as a droplet of coronaguilt, so when we find out whodunit, the question frustratingly remains: “Who?” In other words, the resolution of the crimes is as boring as the revelation that it rains in Seattle.

My apologies to my friends Julie and Jay Bookman and their entire family for ruthlessly dumping on a novel with their surname so vividly displayed on the cover, on the title page and, most sadly, atop half of the 351 pages of text. (Atop the other half of the pages is the name of the author, John Dunning, in case you need to be reminded of who perpetrated this crime against the reading public.) Sadder yet, I guess, is that Dunning’s first-in-the-series novel was “Booked To Die,” and the protagonist was the aforementioned (and aforedraggedthroughtheSeattlemud) Cliff Janeway, so be forewarned: The word “Bookman” may make future appearances.

(Come to think of it, is there any use of being “warned” if it is not “fore?”)