Secondhand Crime

When I looked again at the logo above Mitchell Books I could have kicked myself. How could I have confused it with a Neighborhood Watch poster? Anyone who can read international highway symbols should have realized that this fedora-clad, gun-toting figure is a sign that detective stories are sold within. Instead, I drove right on by the Pasadena used-book store the first time I spotted it, and didn’t bother to return for half a year. That’s when I wanted to kick myself. Thanks to my ignorance, I’d lost six months of browsing in the second-hand store of my dreams.

Mitchell Books, located on East Washington Boulevard for more than a decade, is dedicated exclusively to the literary art of murder. In its narrow aisles, pleasantly shadowy after the sidewalk’s glare, on floor-to-ceiling shelves, fluffy British spinsters are squeezed between hard-boiled American P.I.s and burly law-enforcement officials. And these from every country imaginable, including ancient China and the Navajo Nation. Owner John Mitchell claims his is the largest out-of-print mystery store in the United States, and it’s easy to feel overwhelmed.

I decided to concentrate on two authors I’m currently obsessed with, Margaret Millar and Richard Stark. (Millar, who was married to Ross MacDonald, writes especially well about children. Stark, a pen name of Donald Westlake, is the Camus of the hard-boiled set: His novels are more icily existential than Hammett’s “Red Harvest.”) Even so, I kept getting distracted.

Near the stacks of reasonably priced paperbacks from the past 30 years I discovered bins of lurid-covered pocket books from the ‘40s and ‘50s. Another section was devoted to mysteries with the engraved hardcovers popular in the 1920s, and then there were the first editions, standing slick and seductive in their protective cellophane covers. I try to keep those as a last resort, to be purchased only when a book by a beloved author is long out of print, but I can’t deny that owning one gives me an irrational possessive thrill.

I also kept interrupting my search to eavesdrop. Mitchell is a believer in the old-fashioned virtues of argument, whether political or literary, and in the latter case, anyway, he’s full of good advice. When a customer announced he was a fan of James Crumley’s “The Last Good Kiss,” Mitchell recommended that he try former Angeleno James Ellroy. (It’s not an obvious match but one that’s borne out by the reading habits of many of my friends.) Learning that the man’s wife liked Sue Grafton and her female detective Kinsey Millhone, Mitchell pointed him to another California feminist, Susan Dunlap, and her Berkeley-centered mysteries. “But only the ones with Jill Smith,” he warned. (Sometimes Dunlap features a male protagonist.)

As an added incentive, Mitchell mentioned that the Dunlaps had not yet reached the collectors’ prices of the Graftons. But by then it was already clear to me that this was a store in which readers are as important as collectors. Perhaps that’s because John Mitchell understands that where mysteries are concerned, it’s almost impossible to be one and not the other.

Mitchell Books, 1395 East Washington Blvd. Pasadena, Calif. 91104. (818) 798-4438 .