Rainy weekends at this time of year are lovely and most welcome, at least to us country folk. Not only do they give the crops and gardens a badly needed lift, but, it being too wet to weed the garden or prune the roses, there is nothing for it but to curl up for a good read.
Sunday afternoon, I did just that; I found a quilt, made a cup of tea and curled up with a stack of newsletters which I had picked up on a recent trip to Toronto. “The Merchant of Menace,” as the newsletter is called, is the production of Marian Misters and J. D. Singh, owners (with their cats Paddington and Princess) of Sleuth of Baker Street, a very special bookstore in Toronto.
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It’s special because it carries just one kind of book – mysteries.
It’s a friendly kind of store, organized but a little untidy. Fiction, non-fiction, children’s books.
The walls are lined with them and there are stacks here and there all over the store.
A cat sleeps behind the cash register.
One just knows, from the moment of entry, that this is a store run by booklovers for booklovers.
Some years ago, I cut my mystery teeth on Agatha Christie and Sherlock Holmes.
While I still reread those classics from time to time, I have moved on to a whole list of new authors, all of whom have female protagonists: Sharyn McCrumb with her Elizabeth MacPherson; Sue Grafton with Kinsey Millhone; Jessica Fletcher of Murder She Wrote; Sara Paretsky with V. I. Warshawski; Nevada Barr’s Anna Pigeon; Marcia Muller’s Sharon McCone and, a couple of Canadians, Suzanne North’s Phoebe Fairfax and Gail Bowen’s Joanne Kilbourn.
All these and more were in Sleuth of Baker Street.
I had my list with me and went up and down the aisles picking out one here, one there. What the heck, I had visited an antiques store and had to buy another suitcase anyway, so might as well buy a couple more.
Sleuth of Baker Street is the type of store I’d love to own, one in which I could sample my wares without putting on an ounce!
Unfortunately, a bookstore, let alone a specialty bookstore, is just not in the cards in a rural prairie town; the experts tell me that a population of at least 10,000 is needed to make a bookstore profitable.
Ah, well, one can dream.
After all, what are rainy days for?
