Seven Pillars of Inexpensive Wisdom

Another atmospheric hideout 
on Maryland's Eastern Shore.

Yesterday's prize acquisitions at Market Street Books in Salisbury, Maryland: The Seven Pillars of Wisdom in a U.K. Penguin edition for barely 28 cents per pillar and Volume Two of Francis  Parkman, France and England in North America, in a Library of America edition with slipcase for $12.50.

I shall try to tease some crime out of my reading of history.

© Peter Rozovsky 2014

Where we holed up

(Photos by your humble blogkeeper)

Get city folks in the country, and they think: "Where do we store the loot?"

Me and Palmqvist — "Killer" Palmqvist; she says calling a woman by her last name is unladylike — figured that after we knocked over a couple of banks, we'd find some out-of-the-way farmhouse where we could hole up until the heat died down.

We found good escape routes and a place to divvy the dosh, only all the dinky banks that once made such easy targets along Maryland's Eastern Shore had been converted to upscale steakhouses and pizzerias.

So we'll move on. In the meantime, we posed as egg-headed collectors and riffled old books at Bookplate in Chestertown and Unicorn Bookshop in Trappe and Mystery Loves Company in Oxford.

I had to buy something in order to avoid suspicion. I came up with:

Not the Mississippi 
River delta

• A stack of paperback original mysteries
• The Oxford History of Ireland
• A nice old edition of Emerson's essays for three dollars and ten cents
• A book of extracts in the original French from Rousseau's Confessions, which doesn't mean I'm confessing anything
• Peter Ackroyd's retelling of Le Morte d'Arthur
• Poets and Murder by Robert Van Gulik
• Autumn of the Phantoms by Yasmina Khadra
• Soccer in Sun and Shadow by Eduardo Galeano
• A book about Harriet Tubman and the Underground Railroad
• A guide to trees because I figured nothing marks a fellow as an outsider as much as walking around and pointing up and saying, "What's that?" every two minutes.

© Peter Rozovsky 2013

Eastern Shore noir

Blackwater National Wildlife Refuge, Dorchester
County, Md. Photos by your humble blogkeeper

How noir is Maryland's Eastern Shore? I ate dinner this evening under one large poster from Cape Fear and another from Out of the Past. It takes a tough man to lend his name to a tender steak.

My nice haul at Mystery Loves
Company in Oxford.

When not eating at Mitchum's Steakhouse (really, the blackened rib eye was fine, and so, to the eternal credit of cattleman Mitchum, was the salad), I made a nice haul at Mystery Loves Company in Oxford. The book at the upper left is not, in fact, confidential. It's The Ravagers, by Donald Hamilton, back cover up by mistake.

We drive by night.

© Peter Rozovsky 2013