The Bad Book Affair: A Mobile Library Mystery Read Online Free PDF Page A

favorites such as Lady Chatterley’s Lover , A Clockwork Orange , Nineteen Eighty-four , and American Psycho , and one or two racier titles such as Nancy Friday’s My Secret Garden and The Hite Report . During quieter momentsin isolated lay-bys Israel had been known to have an occasional glance at the latter titles. There was, it seemed, no limit to human ingenuity and imagination. He’d also spent one entire uneventful afternoon on the van counting the various offensive words in Lady Chatterley . Thirty fucks or fuckings, fourteen cunts, thirteen balls, six each of shit and arse, four cocks, and three pisses. Which was quite a lot, really, when you thought about it.
    Not that he agreed with censorship. Not at all. On the contrary. He did not agree with the Unshelved, on principle. As a north London Jewish vegetarian liberal freethinker—someone who would most certainly be reading the Guardian on a daily basis, if the Guardian were available on a daily basis in Tumdrum—Israel saw no problem with open access to all available books and to all of the rich and peculiar outpourings of the human mind. Once you were about eleven, frankly, in Israel’s opinion, you could and should be reading whatever was out there. You might not be able to drink alcohol or marry or drive a car, but surely you should be allowed to read Under the Volcano and Madame Bovary and Crash ? How else were you going to learn? Personally, Israel had gone through all of William Burroughs and D. H. Lawrence and Norman Mailer and Lolita in his local library back home in north London in his early teens, looking for the dirty bits, which usually someone else had already found and had marked on your behalf, and it hadn’t done him any harm at all. Or not much.
    The only books in the library that Israel had any real doubts about were in fact the young adult readers, which were proudly and openly displayed on the mobile on the“Teen Fiction” shelves, in their garish jackets with their subliterate jacket blurbs. Israel avoided uplifting, joyous, life-affirming reads as much as the next man—who cares about Five People You Meet in Heaven with Morrie?—but even he found some of the young adult material depressing and creepy. In Israel’s experience as a librarian most young teenagers these days seemed to be reading deeply disturbing, adult-sanctioned psychosexual fantasies about zombies and vampires. This probably tells you something very profound about where we are as a society, but Israel would have needed the Guardian , or perhaps the Daily Telegraph , to remind him exactly what.
    The Goth waited patiently while Israel scooped up the dozen or so books from the shelf under the desk and placed them on the table. It was always a slightly awkward moment, the displaying of the great Unshelved—you never knew if the borrower really was looking for George Orwell, or was really angling for Madonna’s Sex . Israel suspected that Nineteen Eighty-four was borrowed more times out of embarrassment than out of choice. He always preferred to absent himself while the borrower…browsed.
    “I’ll, er…just tidy a few books here,” he said.
    When the young woman’s nervous shuffling made it clear that she had made her decision, Israel swiftly and discretely issued the books with half-closed eyes.
    “Thank you, then. Enjoy your reading!”
    Philip Roth. American Pastoral : the young woman would not be disappointed.
    Israel glanced at his watch.
    Eleven o’clock.
    Which in a town like Tumdrum, wherever you were, meant only one thing.
    Zelda’s.
    He called Gloria, again, quickly.
    No reply.

3
    P earce Pyper was wearing an oatmeal sweater—or at least a woolen sweater of an oatmeal color—and a pair of bright red corduroy paint-splattered plus fours, and worn brown leather sandals, and knee-length papal yellow socks, and a black beret. Two of his dogs, the mongrels, Picasso and Matisse, in their matching blue paisley neckerchiefs, sat by him, eyes closed, tongues