Read Online Book Club by Loren D. Estleman - Free Book Online Page A

“He’s a cartoon character. Not every book is Wuthering Heights .”
    â€œThe dancing bear’s a symbol, folks,” said another man whose voice the chief couldn’t peg right away. “Irving’s making a point about the folly of human nature.”
    Ned put in another two cents’ worth. “Symbols, shmymbols. Leave it to a newspaperman to like a book about a boy biting a dog.”
    That made the other man Gordon Tolliver, the publisher of The Good Adviser, a weekly, popularly believed to have been founded by Horace Greeley. At fifty, he’d be the youngest member of the club.
    There followed a lively exchange of views, simultaneous and pierced through by Birdie’s stridor.
    â€œFriends, friends,” Sharecross’ reedy tenor quieted the tumult. “This is a literary discussion, not professional wrestling. Ned: There’s a great deal more to The World According to Garp than a boy biting a dog, which you’d know if you’d read past the opening chapters instead of just counting the pages.
    Miss Flatt: He’s not quite a figure of tragedy, because the book is intended as a black comedy, and you can’t have both on the same stage at the same time. Neither is he a cartoon character, Carl; he’s too fleshed-out for that. Gordon, it pains me to tell you that the dancing bear is just a dancing bear. There’s one in nearly every book Irving’s written. It’s his trademark, like Poe’s gloomy tarn and Ayn Rand’s monologues.”
    â€œNext time, let’s read Louis L’Amour,” said Uncle Ned. “His dogs don’t get bit and his bears don’t do the polka.”
    â€œLet’s mix it up a bit. Each of you pick a book, and we’ll compare their various merits and shortcomings next week. Don’t forget to mark it in the ledger before you go.”
    Dockerty emerged from the literary labyrinth just as the group was rising from its folding chairs. Sharecross, who’d been holding court from behind his massive desk, as old and gray as the bookshelves— hell, as old as him, thought the chief—got up from his wooden swivel to greet his visitor. The others nodded greetings, each preoccupied with his or her quest among the stock.
    â€œA pleasant surprise, Chief. Have I persuaded you to join us at last? An experienced criminologist will be invaluable when we take up Ed McBain.”
    The bookseller resembled a caricature of the trade: gaunt, with hair of a gray to match his shelves straggling to his collar, thick spectacles, and limbs like bent pipe cleaners, his knees and elbows trying to gnaw through the rusty black woolen suit he wore even when the temperature topped a hundred. Now that he thought about it, Dockerty had never seen the man sweat. If someone fetched him a hard blow, his pores would release only dry air and desiccated bindings.
    â€œI’m a cop, not a detective,” the chief said. “That’s your specialty.”
    â€œI’ve been a bookseller longer than I was a detective. Back then, DNA stood for Do Not Arrest. The captain had a blind spot where his son was concerned.”
    In the beginning, Dockerty had had trouble picturing this elderly scarecrow collaring and interrogating suspects. Any Hollywood studio would have cast him as the absent-minded ascetic in some musty archive. Then he’d Googled Sharecross’ name, and spent twenty minutes reading commendations and looking at pictures of him shaking hands with a U.S. attorney general, an FBI director, and the graduating class at the New York Police Academy. In one shot, with a chestful of medals and a police commissioner placing a ribbon around his neck ending in yet another decoration, his dress uniform appeared to be wearing him rather than the other way around. Even back then he’d looked like an assistant professor employed by a not-very-distinguished university. Twenty years into his own career, the chief