FFB: Blue Octavo

Bibliomysteries are a subgenre of crime fiction in which manuscripts, books, libraries, bookstores or publishing houses (or any employees thereof) play a large role. They date back at least to The Lost Library by Fredric Perkins in 1874, and many well-known authors have used the theme since, even Chandler's The Big Sleep (1939) with its rare book dealer who is fronting for something entirely different.

It's rarer to find an author of the genre who is a real-life book dealer, but John Blackburn is one example. Born in Northumberland in 1923, he was the brother of poet Thomas Blackburn, although the writing bug didn't bite John early. He served in the British merchant navy during World War II and then as a schoolmaster, before becoming director of Red Lion Books.

In 1958 he published his first work, A Scent of New-Mown Hay, which is a blend of science fiction and horror, themes that permeated many of his novels. He also penned several international espionage thrillers, including those with General Charles Kirk of British Intelligence and his sidekicks, scientist Sir Marcus Levin and his Russian wife Tania.

Blackburn's Blue Octavo (titled Bound to Kill in the U.S.), was published in 1963, and is a departure from most of his other books, but is likely the one most rooted in his own life and the biblio world. The hero is John Cain, a young bookseller who inherits the stock of a curmudgeonly antisocial dealer, James Roach, after he appears to have committed suicide. Or so the police soon conclude.

Cain is unconvinced, especially considering the alleged suicide followed the dead man's strange behavior at an auction where Roach had grossly overbid on a thin blue volume about mountain climbing. The book appeared to be as exciting as its title, Grey Boulders, but why had Roach been so obsessed with owning it and why is it now missing from Roach's collection?

As Cain digs deeper, he realizes Roach was murdered over that book, and in his bumbling attempts to get to the bottom of the mystery, he crosses paths with an unconventional young heiress, Julia Lent, and the noted author and mountaineer J. Moddon Mott. The three join forces in a hectic quest to uncover why a book with fewer than 50 remaining copies is worth three murders, attempted murder and blackmail. And where do a dying millionaire and a tortured clergyman with burned feet fit into the puzzle?

As you'd expect from a bookseller/author writing a bibliomystery, Blue Octavo is filled with details about  bookselling (at least as it was in Britain in the early 1960s). John Kennedy Melling notes, in his foreword to the Black Dagger reprint, that the novel gives "a revealing insight into the world of books, with a clear explanation of how the Ring works in bidding at public auctions, descriptions of bookseller's shops and stocks which immediately conjure up pictures of shops known to all book collectors, and some useful tips on collecting the editions—to say nothing of how to deal with auctioneers who won't cooperate."

Still, the thriller elements are enough to inspire author and Shots Magazine columnist Mike Ripley to include the work (along with Blackburn's A Ring of Roses) on his list of favorite thrillers. Maybe it has to do with the Hitchcockian climax in a factory tower.