John Dunning

• Born: January 9, 1942
• Birthplace: Brooklyn, New York
• Died: May 23, 2023
• Place of death: Denver, Colorado

Types of Plot: Amateur sleuth; hard-boiled; historical

Principal Series: Cliff “the Bookman” Janeway, 1992-

Contribution

John Dunning has shone a bright light on the arcane world of book collecting, unintentionally making the job of the used book dealer much harder. Booked to Die (1992), the first title in the Janeway series, was an instant success largely achieved through word of mouth via the vast underground network of bibliophiles. The novel dealt with collecting books and searching for rare books and the collectors themselves, and it cross-bred the hard-boiled tradition with the BiblioMystery. Dunning found a literate, largely untapped audience; a series hero who appealed equally to men and women; and a reason to keep writing novels when he was on the brink of giving up.

Dunning found early success in the mystery genre with two titles, Looking for Ginger North (1980) and Deadline (1981), both nominated for Edgar Awards. However, it was eleven long years between Deadline and Booked to Die, which won a Nero Wolfe Award. During those years, Dunning operated a bookstore in Denver and has said he would have been content to remain on the selling side of the book business.

Before the Janeway series, Dunning had written five titles, three of them mysteries. He had met with limited success, but his circle of Denver literary acquaintances urged him to keep writing. Warwick Downing, a friend and fellow Denver author, suggested that he write a book about a dealer in rare books. Booked to Die is dedicated to Downing. Dunning’s Janeway series foreshadowed a recent trend and no doubt influenced the publication of popular and more recent titles focused on the world of rare books, including Arturo Perez-Reverte’s El club Dumas (1993; The Club Dumas, 1996) and Ian Caldwell and Dustin Thomason’s The Rule of Four (2004).

Biography

John Dunning was born in Brooklyn, New York, in 1942. He grew up in Charleston, South Carolina, where he earned a General Educational Development (GED) certificate. Despite his lack of formal education, he was an avid writer from a young age. Dunning’s early literary influences included the Edward Stratemeyer Syndicate’s Hardy Boys, Rover Boys, and Tom Swift series. He was even more influenced by Walter Farley’s Black Stallion series. However, Dunning found it difficult to find an audience for his writing as he lacked the proper credentials. He entered the U.S. Army but was quickly discharged because of a broken eardrum. Subsequently, he worked as a glass cutter in Charleston and then in Denver. His interest in horses drew him to a local track, where he was hired as a groomer. Five years as a groomer, sleeping in tack rooms and traveling the western United States opened Dunning’s eyes to a simpler life and an easy camaraderie among horse trainers, jockeys, and his fellow groomers. Dunning still wanted to earn a living by writing, so he made repeated requests for work at the Denver Post.

Dunning began as a copy boy at the Denver Post and slowly rose to copy boy/reporter, writing book reviews and covering the police beat. After years of persisting, he was appointed a member of the newspaper’s three-man investigative team. Working as an investigative reporter introduced Dunning to police detectives and helped him hone his research skills.

Dunning’s first published novel was the mystery The Holland Suggestions (1975), a book that blended the subjects of history and hypnosis. However, he sent his follow-up mystery novel, Looking for Ginger North (1980), to twenty-two publishers before one accepted it. Its original title was Bloodline, but the book took so long to reach publication that in the meantime, Sidney Sheldon published his own Bloodline (1978), and Dunning’s book had to be renamed. Dunning’s third mystery title, Deadline (1981), had a completely different reception. Written in only a few months, the book was sold to the first publisher who read it.

After Deadline, Dunning hit a rough eleven-year patch of publisher rejections. He had sold a nonmystery novel, Denver (1980), and he was successful in publishing a book about one of his other passions, old-time radio. Dunning eventually wrote a second reference book on old-time radio, a one-volume work that is still considered the definitive source on the subject. For twenty-five years, he broadcast a radio show in Denver featuring old-time radio programs. Using his knowledge of old-time radio, he helped score Robert Altman’s 1974 film Thieves Like Us. Dunning and his wife, Helen, bought Old Algonquin Books in Denver, a shop that served as the real model for Janeway’s fictional Twice Told Books. The shop in Denver was closed after Booked to Die was published, but Old Algonquin Books became an online retailer.

Analysis

John Dunning has attention deficit disorder, which was undiagnosed for most of his life. This condition probably explains why he did not finish high school and why his writing process is slow. Dunning has said that it sometimes takes him ten hours to get two hours of work done. Despite his condition, he has written best-selling novels and a number of nonfiction works.

For most of his writing career, Dunning wrote on a manual typewriter, saying the personal computer was a left-brained tool trying to do a right-brain job. In many ways, he is a throwback to earlier times when authors such as James M. Cain (Dunning’s favorite mystery writer), Cornell Woolrich, and Raymond Chandler wrote tight plots with terse, fast, hard-hitting dialogue. Dunning’s hero, Cliff Janeway, however, has more modern sensibilities than those authors’ lonely detectives in the knight-errant tradition. For example, he can relate to a woman without necessarily having to rough her up.

The Janeway series appeals to the intellect without being overly erudite and is suited for the reader who enjoys fast-paced action and solid dialogue and can appreciate the insights that Dunning offers based on his own experiences. To read an author is to share his passions: Dunning’s novels about rare-book collecting, journalism, old-time radio, and horse racing are all reflections of his own world and experiences. The art of the novel lies in the ability to present one’s world in an honest, compelling, dynamic way that connects with the reader’s own intellect.

Deadline

In Deadline, Dunning’s third mystery novel, Dalton Walker is a reporter covering a circus-tent fire in which an eight-year-old girl has died. The fire story runs parallel to another assignment, an interview with dancer Diana Yoder, who was raised in the Amish faith. These two seemingly different stories intertwine. Except for the hero Walker, the characters, especially some of the women, are not as cleverly drawn as those in the Janeway series. Despite this flaw, this is a tightly written novel with plenty of Dunning’s typically well-researched background. Dunning has stated an intent to write a sequel to Deadline, which was written in less than two months and sold to the first publisher to see it.

Booked to Die

The first title in the Cliff Janeway series, Booked to Die (1992) met with great reviews. After reading the novel, which was full of details about the book trade, readers who were lovers of books were converted overnight into part-time book scouts (a person who finds bargain books and sells them to bookstores for less than full value). In the book, police officer Cliff Janeway is forced off the force and opens a little bookstore to pursue his hobby and make some money. Jackie Newton, a local man Janeway loathes, becomes a suspect in the murder of book scout Bobby Westfall. The terse, tight prose combined with the revelations about the book trade made Booked to Die a valuable book among collectors. Original hardback editions more than quadrupled in value.

The Bookman’s Wake

In The Bookman’s Wake (1995), Janeway returns to try to save an ingenue book scout who has jumped bail and is suspected in the theft of a priceless edition of Edgar Allan Poe’s The Raven, a book some experts claim was never even printed. The book scout, who calls herself Eleanor Rigby, has purportedly stolen the rare edition printed by master printers Darryl Grayson and Richard Grayson and has run off to Seattle. The Grayson brothers died under mysterious circumstances years earlier when fire destroyed their business. Janeway joins with Trish Aandahl, the biographer of the Grayson brothers, and determines that the fire in the Grayson publishing house was no accident. Digging even deeper, they discover a serial killer who may have committed five other murders. The Bookman’s Wake attempts to do for fine printing what Booked to Die did for book collecting. The reader certainly learns a great deal about the printing process and bookbinding.

The Bookman’s Promise

Nine years after the second installment in the Janeway series, The Bookman’s Promise (2004) finds Cliff Janeway counting the money he made from his caper in The Bookman’s Wake. What should he do with this windfall? Of course, he buys an expensive book. He buys Richard Francis Burton’s famous account of his travels to Mecca and Medina. Janeway is fascinated by the eighteenth century explorer and is reveling in the purchase of his book when the rightful owner inconveniently shows up in his bookstore. Josephine Gallant, who is in her nineties, is the granddaughter of Charles Warren, companion to Burton during his pre-Civil War visit to the United States. She once had a great collection of Burton titles but was cheated out of her collection by Dean Treadwell and Carl Treadwell, unscrupulous book dealers in Baltimore. The chase takes Janeway east and to the past. Dunning takes the reader to 1861, when Burton, presumably on a secret mission at the bidding of Britain’s prime minister, lands in South Carolina. Strangely, though Burton’s travels have been extensively chronicled, there appears to be no existing account of this trip. Dunning has Burton meeting with Abner Doubleday, and they discuss the possible defense of Fort Sumter.

During the years between the second and third novels in the series, Dunning was working on the reference work On the Air: The Encyclopedia of Old-Time Radio (1998). Because of this commitment, he delayed the third installment in the Janeway series even as his many fans demanded more. Although he had allowed significant gaps to form between publishing the first three novels in the Janeway series, Dunning completed the next two books in the series in rapid succession: The Sign of the Book (2005) and The Bookwoman’s Last Fling (2006).

Principal Series Character:

• Cliff Janeway owns a used bookstore, specializing in rare books and first editions. A retired Denver police officer, he has begun a new life as a small-business owner with a passion for expensive books. The behind-the-scenes details and the diverse characters inhabiting the book world provide interesting and sometimes even fascinating twists to the stories. Janeway is a more cerebral, more sensitive, more modern representative of the hard-boiled detective tradition. He can be disarmingly charming and physically intimidating by turns, like Dashiell Hammett’s Sam Spade, but his intellect and sensibilities are more like Robert B. Parker’s Spenser.

Bibliography

Dickinson, Jane. “Keeping a Promise After Ten Years, Dunning Delivers Sequel.” Denver Rocky Mountain News, March 12, 2004, p. 24D. Written on the occasion of The Bookman’s Promise, the article discusses the nine-year gap since the previous series title.

Dunning, John. “The Bookman’s Eye.” Interview by Charles L. P. Silet. The Armchair Detective 28, no. 2 (1995): 124-133. This is a far-ranging interview done just before the release of The Bookman’s Wake, the second title in the Janeway series.

Dunning, John. “The Bookman’s Progress.” Interview by Charles L. P. Silet. Mystery Scene 84 (March 1, 2004): 26-29. This interview discusses Dunning’s historical mystery novel Two O’Clock Eastern Wartime, his nonfictional reference works on radio history, and the background research done for The Bookman’s Promise.

Lambert, Pam. “The Thrill of the Hunt.” People Weekly 23, no. 43 (June 12, 1995): 27. Written soon after the release of Booked to Die, the article discusses book collecting and Dunning’s background as a dealer in rare books.

Old Algonquin Books. http://www.oldalgonquin.com. The Web site for the online store run by Dunning and his wife, Helen, contains a good deal of biographical information about Dunning and publication information on each of his titles.

Scaggs, John. Crime Fiction. New York: Routledge, 2005. Contains chapters on hard-boiled mysteries and historical crime fiction that shed light on Dunning’s work.