Art Bourgeau

Whodunit

by Duane Swierczynski

Michael T. Regan

When some people find themselves walking around with a head full of mud, where nothing in the world seems to make sense anymore, they go see a shrink. Or a priest. Or a bar stool.

I usually head to Whodunit.

You know the joint — that used mystery bookstore over near 20th and Chestnut. The stock rotates, but somehow it always has that feel of an older, simpler, less frantic Philadelphia. A Philly that has tap rooms on the corners, not BYOBS or "restaubars." The kind of place where Mickey Spillane, when he was alive, could stop by with a six of Miller Lite and hang with the owner in the back, just chilling out. (And indeed, he did once.)

I stopped in a couple of weeks ago. I hit the shelves, head tilted at an angle, letting my eyes wander over the spines of dusty paperbacks — stuff people call "pulp fiction" — looking for those holy grail paperbacks that I'll probably never find, but insist on looking for anyway. A few minutes into my visit, Art Bourgeau, co-owner of the place, came up to me and we started talking. He's known me since 1994, when I stopped in after work one day — just a 22-year-old punk kid looking for something new to read. I left with a small stack of paperbacks that changed my life.

"That's what young guys read," Art told me back then. "It's the covers — the scantily clad bad blonde with her hair piled up, smoking — which draw 'em, of course. And who else would have problems with bad blondes in the middle of the afternoon than young guys?"

Ever since that first visit, I've returned on a regular basis. To search for those holy grails. But also to talk to Art.

Back in the present, we stood at about the same spot in the store — directly in the middle, in the narrow spaces between the overloaded wooden bookshelves. Art asked about my novels. I told him what I was working on next.

He thought about it.

Then he said something to me. Just one sentence.

And goddamn if that wasn't what I needed to hear at just that moment. And it set me off in a line of thinking I haven't been able shake ever since.

Art has a way of doing that to me.

I wish I could tell you exactly what he said. But like the sacrament of Holy Confession, some things are meant to stay between priest and supplicant.

Nor can I reveal Art's one-line advice to me about women, which served me well over the years. (At least, in the years before I was married.)

Sometimes, you have to preserve the mystery.

But when I say that Art changed my life, I mean it. One of the books he pressed into my hands was a bank-robbery-gone-wrong called The Name of the Game is Death, by a guy named Dan J. Marlowe. It was a mid-1980s Black Lizard edition — gray and black, with a color illustration of a man who looked so feral and tough, it was as if he'd partially devolved back to ape. "You'll like this," Art said at the time. For some reason, I didn't get around to it. Years passed. I changed apartments three times. When I finally read the novel, it blew the top of my skull clean off. Still more years later, I wrote my own bank-robbery-gone-wrong novel, and looking back, I can see the seeds that Art planted in my hand way back in 1994. It's like he knew.

Afternoons with those bad blondes have somehow turned into my side career as a crime novelist.

What I know of Art personally isn't really much, now that I think about it. There is no comprehensive biography of Art in my mind; it's like chunks of tall tales and urban legends and shared wisdom and little pieces I've probably made up. He has a soothing, professorial Tennessee accent, but I have no idea when he landed here in Philly. I know he hung around with Pete Dexter and Randall "Tex" Cobb back in the day — more than a quarter-century ago. He was there when Dexter and Cobb got the crap beat out of them. Art teaches Judo. (I'm not sure if these last two facts are related.) He's written mysteries (the Snake and J.T. series) as well as a comprehensive, brutally honest survey of the genre (The Mystery Lover's Companion) that I pull off my shelf at least once a month. Art claims that modesty isn't his strongest suit — he said so in his Companion, where he rated his own novels on a sliding dagger scale of "A True Classic" (five daggers) to "Only Read This One When You're Drunk" (one dagger). I think Art is very modest — as I recall, he awarded his books only three daggers — "a good job."

Mostly, though, we talk about stuff I'm writing. Stuff I should read. Stuff I'm doing. Stuff I should think about.

If all of this sounds one-sided ... well, guilty as charged. I don't know that Art takes away much from my visits, except for the few bucks he earns from selling me paperbacks.

Meanwhile, I feel like I walk away with a treasure. Every single time.