Career Answer Found in Whodunits

All the clues suggest that Dick Hart, 43, knew his new career would be a mystery. Well, sort of.

“I didn’t want to be 54 and say I should have,” said the Laguna Hills man who has become what may be Orange County’s sole mystery book specialty store owner.

The store has a Sherlock Holmes-type magnifying glass hanging above the entrance.

Hart said the decision was based partly on midlife crisis, and in part was the fulfillment of what he called his “great American Dream.”

“I succeeded in what I had been doing and while I hadn’t conquered everything, it was good,” the Colgate University graduate said.

Opening his own store has always been in his thoughts, said the transplanted New Yorker, who spent most of his working life in the wholesale furniture business.

“I knew I wanted to merchandise something and mystery books seemed like a good idea. And I knew it would be in California,” he said.

He had been to California several times, contending “I spent the equivalent of one year visiting Disneyland.”

Although he claims to have read every Perry Mason book and parts of most of what he carries in his store, he’s not in it for a literary adventure.

“I’m a businessman who owns a bookstore that has to make money,” he said. “While I enjoy reading mysteries, at the end of the day I can put it down and go home.”

Hart said he was a voracious reader while growing up and had a particular liking for mystery novels.

But Hart’s late father, also a furniture wholesaler, had told him: “Never go into a retail business. The hours are long, long and longer.”

Still, Hart went ahead and opened the Green Door Mystery Book Store in San Juan Capistrano.

Its hours are 10:30 a.m. to 7, 9 and 10:30 p.m. on alternating days, and it’s open seven days a week.

“He was right,” said Hart, who nevertheless is having a good time with his career.

While Hart acknowledges that his work schedule is fatiguing, he says it is satisfying.

He said the fact that “more money is coming in than going out” of his one-man shop helps ease the long hours and time away from his family.

In fact, if the business continues its moneymaking pace, he plans to open other stores to take advantage of what he considers a broadening market of mystery readers, most of them 24 and older.

The name of the store, The Green Door, was based on a trip Hart took to Scotland, where he rented a room with a creaky green door during a night of thunder and lightning.

“They told me the room was haunted and I didn’t sleep that night,” he remembers. “I always said if I opened a business it would be called Green Door something.”

But he had some second thoughts because of an X-rated adult movie with green door in its title.

“I didn’t want people to think I was an adult bookstore,” he said.

Hart feels mystery books will always be popular.

“They (mystery books) are sort of real life, once removed,” he said. “I think a new wave is coming in for mystery books and I have a head start.”