Mystery Bookworms

When Kevin Moore and Kathy Johnson decided to fulfill their longtime dream of opening a mystery bookstore last fall, they didn’t have any trouble stocking their shelves.

Between them, the two friends had accumulated close to 10,000 volumes--from autographed copies of John D. Macdonald’s Travis McGee mysteries to rare, early titles in Sue Grafton’s bestselling “alphabet” mystery series.

“In some cases, because I was buying extras, I might have two or three copies of each book,” said Moore, 53. “A lot of these books are unread. I bought them and carefully put them away for the future.”

For Moore--she’s manager of the Anaheim Central Library--and Johnson, president of a Redondo Beach-based psychiatric management company, the future arrived last October when they opened Murder in the Gallery in Orange.

So named because it is housed inside an art gallery on Glassell Street just north of the traffic circle in the city’s historic district, Murder in the Gallery specializes in contemporary and vintage-collectible mysteries.

It is the latest in a handful of mystery bookstores to crop up in Orange County over the last two decades as the popularity of mysteries took off like the guilty party at a murder scene.

Some stores, however, have vanished without a trace.

Gone are the Green Door Mystery Bookstore in San Juan Capistrano and the short-lived It’s a Mystery to Me in Yorba Linda.

The most recent casualty: Mystery Ink, which began as a separate store in Laguna Beach in 1991. After a change of venue in Huntington Beach, Mystery Ink returned to Laguna as a part of Upchurch-Brown Booksellers, a general bookstore.

In March, however, Upchurch-Brown owner Nanette Heiser abandoned her Forest Avenue location and Mystery Ink disappeared with it.

But like the legendary black bird in Dashiell Hammett’s “The Maltese Falcon,” Mystery Ink has resurfaced again.

In May, owner Debbie Mitsch moved part of her stock of more than 1,000 mysteries into a corner of Bookman Too, a used bookstore on Beach Boulevard in Huntington Beach.

Though she continues to work full time as finance manager for a car dealership, Mitsch had no intention of giving up her mystery book sideline.

“No, I love books; that’s my thing,” said Mitsch, 48, who majored in English in college and has been a mystery fan since she discovered Nancy Drew as a child.

Upchurch-Brown’s Heiser, who now sells books over the Internet--”I just decided I could probably make as much money on the Internet as in that building, without having to pay rent”--said Mitsch’s Mystery Ink section of her store always did well.

“I had science fiction and romance, but they didn’t sell even close to as well as mysteries,” Heiser said. “I think Debbie’s very good at what she does and she knows her books. She’s definitely a survivor.”

So are the owners of the county’s two other mystery bookstores: Joan Wunsch, whose Coffee, Tea & Mystery opened in Westminster in 1994; and Pat and Ed Thomas, owners of the granddaddy of Orange County mystery bookstores: Book Carnival in Orange, which evolved from a general bookstore into a shop specializing in mystery, science fiction and dark fantasy in 1985.

Book Carnival, however, stopped carrying sci-fi four years ago because, Ed Thomas said, “mysteries were literally outselling science fiction 8 to 1.”

Thomas, who began selling books after retiring as a sales manager for a folding-carton manufacturer, believes a specialty mystery bookstore must sell new and old titles to survive.

One feeds off the other, he said. A customer may pick up a book originally published eight years ago, then return for the latest book by that author. Or vice versa: someone will buy a new title and come back to buy the author’s earlier books.

Thomas said a mystery bookstore might be courting disaster if it sells only new titles.

“Most of them, let’s face it, you can find at Barnes & Noble or Crown” and other chain bookstores offering discounts, he said. “Carrying the combination of the two has been our salvation, anyway.”

But with competition from the chain bookstores and increasing sales over the Internet, Thomas believes this is a “dangerous time” to launch an independent mystery bookstore.

“It’s almost like you have a hole in your head to try this in this day and age,” he said. “I have people come in and tell me, ‘Gee, this is what I’ve always wanted to do, open a bookstore.’ They say, ‘I’ve always loved books.’ That’s the reason to do it. You’re not going to get rich.”

Coffee, Tea & Mystery’s Wunsch, who previously worked as a registered nurse, agrees.

“I thought it sounded like a lot of fun, and I had no idea how much work was going to be involved,” said Wunsch, who is at her store--she shares space with Keeper’s Antiques--seven days a week.

“I pretty much live here, but I enjoy it,” she said. “It’s not like it’s a hardship.”

There’s no denying Moore and Johnson enjoy the world of mysteries.

Johnson, 47, reads nearly 300 a year; Moore once read 400 to 500 mysteries a year--”I don’t watch much TV and I tend to have insomnia”--but is now down to only 150 to 200 a year.

Despite their affinity for a well-told whodunit, both women concede that they couldn’t have afforded to go into the bookstore business without a partner.

When they heard that Jim Hathcock, president of the Anaheim Public Library Foundation, was interested in opening an art gallery, the trio decided to team up and share expenses.

About 2,500 mysteries, sharing space with California and Southwest art, are displayed in four bookcases and two large tables at Murder in the Gallery. That’s not to mention 400 more books in a back storeroom, 3,000 in a storage locker and several thousand more that are still stashed in Moore’s home in Norco.

“We rotate the books on the shelves to make sure different things are out,” Moore said. “I get asked for things all the time and go home and pull them out of storage.”

Moore said she wanted to own a mystery bookstore almost as soon as she began working in libraries. That was in 1975, about the same time Moore began what she calls her “serious collecting.”

By the time Sue Grafton began publishing her Kinsey Millhone mystery series in 1982, Moore said, “I was buying very heavily all the new writers.” Today, she said, Grafton’s hard-to-come-by earliest titles, “A Is for Alibi” and “B Is for Burglar,” are “high-end collectibles” that fetch more than $1,000 apiece.

There’s Evidence of Wise Owners

Being able to tell a customer which books are likely to appreciate in value as collectibles is only one of the services she can provide mystery lovers that the chain stores can’t, Moore said.

“I’m always promoting the new authors and looking for the new author who’s going to be significant, so we’ll do a lot of signings with authors who would be ignored by the big chains or by other stores,” she said.

“The very fact that I can discuss a book with customers, give them two or three options to read, and discuss the author intelligently,” she said, is a customer service most general bookstores cannot give mystery fans.

Hathcock, owner of the Gallery on Glassell and himself a mystery fan, says Moore’s knowledge of the field is her biggest asset.

“I haven’t met anyone else who knows the mystery genre better than she does,” he said.

Moore does indeed have an impressive background as the co-owner of a mystery bookstore.

She’s a charter member of Sisters in Crime, the international support group for women mystery writers and readers founded in 1986.

A scholar of the contemporary mystery, Moore has taught several series of classes on the History of the Mystery, Women in Mystery, the Modern Mystery through UCLA extension.

She’s also taught undergraduate classes on the genre at Cypress College and has done presentations and training on the mystery genre for fellow librarians throughout the country. And in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s, she and the late mystery writer John Ball published and wrote the reviews for As Crime Goes By, a review journal sponsored by the Anaheim Central Library that had nearly 600 subscribers around the world.

Together, Moore and Johnson have organized two Left Coast Crime regional mystery fan conventions in Anaheim.

Moore plans to retire from the library in 2 1/2 years. Then, she said, she’ll devote full time to Murder in the Gallery.

Until then, Johnson works at the store on Saturdays and Moore is there on Sundays; and they both try to be on hand for book signings.

Moore, who plans to start leading a book discussion group at the shop in July, is also known to “pop in” for a couple of hours on Saturdays.

“It’s far less stressful than what I do now [at the library],” she said. “I’m in the store 20 minutes and I can feel my blood pressure go down 15 points. It’s just a different environment. It’s a beautiful physical place and, of course, I’m surrounded by the books. It’s just a very peaceful way to spend the day.”