Rob Price
Gutbrain Records
rob + gutbrain.com = email


2018 June 13 • Wednesday

The Bookstore Restaurant in Wellfleet, MA, is one of the best places to eat in Cape Cod and one of a few that remains open in the off season.

The bookstore part of it has been of special interest to me for over twenty years. The original owner opened his first bookshop in Worcester, MA, in 1934. Oceans of Books by the Sea, as the Wellfleet store is named, was a treasure trove of old books and hundreds, perhaps thousands, of old magazines.

As far as I can tell, nothing was ever restocked. "Grandpa", as everybody seemed to call him, was just selling off everything he'd accumulated in more than half a century in the trade. (He was also a police officer in some capacity, perhaps deputy or something. He had a badge.)

Back in the '90s, the place was insane. I didn't have a lot of money to spend but I could have spent thousands of dollars, even though Grandpa didn't really care about keeping up with the price guides. The comic books could be on the expensive side, but I wasn't interested in those. All those old pulps and other magazines, for $5, $10, $20...

Grandpa died a while back, maybe seventeen or eighteen years ago, and since the bookstore part of The Bookstore Restaurant is only open between Memorial Day and Labor Day and I tend to go to the Cape in the off season, I don't get there very often.

I was there last weekend, though, for the first time in seven years. And while the stock has diminished, I did find a few treasures, all reasonably priced.

The first thing I saw when I got there was a table of old paperbacks outside, five for one dollar. I found twelve I wanted and was charged a mere two dollars.

We'll take a look at the old magazines I got later. But of these books, the opening paragraph of Dan J. Marlowe's Operation Breakthrough is a startling example of genre fiction craft at its best.

Perhaps the rest of the book doesn't measure up. I've read a few of Marlowe's novels, probably more than twenty years ago, and I remember them as being inconsistent and perhaps unfocused. But I don't really remember them much at all, except for a few isolated bits of The Name of the Game Is Death, and Operation Breakthrough has got me interested in paying some attention to him again.

Here's the opening paragraph. The first sentence sets the action in motion while also establishing place and action: a bank robbery, as anybody familiar with this territory will immediately realize.

Each of the following sentences in this paragraph expands outwards from here, like ripples, enlarging the scene and our knowledge of what's happening, when and where and with whom. It was with great reluctance that I didn't keep reading, and I appear to have left this book on Cape Cod... I hope it's still there when I go back. If not, it shouldn't be hard to find, since I paid less than twenty cents for it.

The bank was on the ground floor of a four-story downtown Nassau office building. My watch said ten minutes past midnight when we started up the rust-encrusted fire escape at the rear of the department store next to the bank. I could feel the perspiration breaking out on the back of my neck in the humidity of the Bahamian night as we lugged our equipment up to the roof. With anyone less strong than Karl Erikson for a pack-horse partner it would have taken more than one trip.

Now that's how you set a scene, start a ball rolling, establish character and atmosphere, use descriptive writing sparingly ("rust-encrusted fire escape"). Later we learn that sweating makes the narrator's plastic-surgery scars itch, "especially under my wig", another wonderful detail.

Looks like I have to spend time with Dan Marlowe again.