Read Online Bookscout by John Dunning - Free Book Online

Introduction
    I HAVE ALWAYS LOVED a good short story. A story offers a concentrated moment of truth that’s difficult to achieve in the sprawling expanse of a novel. Here, in a space of 5,000 words, the hero is put to a test and in this his entire life is revealed. Writer and reader join in a brief dream, and if the final vision is slightly different for each reader, this underscores the art, heightens rather than undercuts it.
    As everyone knows, short fiction has been a casualty of the times. It’s true that stories are still being written. Anthologies, though they are usually the first candidates for the remainder tables at the year-end clearout of publishers’ warehouses, are still being published. But the days are long gone when the story was a prime-time magazine entertainment. Magazines today are like flytraps for such momentous “nonfiction” topics as breast enlargement, bedroom aerobatics and celebrity profiles. That each of these articles is a clone of all the others seems not to matter much: the magazines thrive (at least those with the biggest boobs and the very best fourposter foreplay seem to do okay), and the short story goes the way of all good things.
    C’est la freaking guerre.
    I learned to write by reading short fiction, notably the stories of Ernest Hemingway and Irwin Shaw. I have always considered Shaw an underrated master: Such tales as Sailor off the Bremen and Act of Faith seemed to me then (and still do) to be beautifully conceived and realized. Shaw is still one of my cornerstones, one who led the way into the land of consonants and vowels and demonstrated how well short work can be done. He wrote some great novels too, his sniveling critics be damned. I think his best book is The Troubled Air, a gripping narrative of the radio business in the shadow of McCarthyism. Sadly, it is seldom read today, and if teachers and critics ever mention his name it’s his short work they recommend. Even the critics have to admit that Shaw wrote superb stories.
    The magazines of the forties were sometimes described as a training ground for novelists, but they were much more than that. Often those nickel-a-word monthlies kept a struggling writer alive while he wrote his first big book, and in the process a vast and valuable national inventory of short literature was amassed. By the time I was able to string three sentences together, this era was in full retreat. Writers today stay alive as best they can. They teach. They sell blood. They dress up their waiflike children like characters from Dickens and send them into the streets with tin cups to beg for gruel. Some, like yours truly, are lucky enough to have working wives. And when they write, they tend to work on books, figuring that a novel has at least a chance of someday paying for itself.
    I yearn unabashedly for the old days. How great it would be to take two months off between books and “write some stories” as Hemingway used to do, and to know there’s a hungry market waiting, whether you’re Ernest Hemingway at the top of your game or Joe Blow just getting started.
    For one who professes to love the story, my output has been rather piddling. It seems I’m always too busy trying to make a living. I did write a few a dozen years ago, during a brief residence at a Denver magazine. The first of these, Bookscout, still has a warm place in my heart. More than anything I’ve written, this goes to the core of what I am, both as a writer and as a bookhunter. The character is not me, but I can identify with his situation. I’ve been able to wear two hats in the book world—have separate, complementing careers within the same incredibly rich field of work—and in this I consider myself truly a lucky man. How many of us find even one career that sustains us for a lifetime, in all the ways that really count?
    I come full circle, back to Shaw. I remember bookscouting in my early days, beating the bushes much as my man Joel does in these pages. There was