Editor’s Note: Thomas Shawver is a former marine officer, lawyer, and journalist with American City Business Journals. An avid rugby player and international traveler, Shawver owned Bloomsday Books, an antiquarian bookstore in Kansas City, before penning his first mystery novel, The Dirty Book Murder. He’s now at work on the third Rare Book mystery.

Serendipity. What a delightful word to connote achieving good fortune through an effortless chance encounter. Or, as Julius H. Comroe defined it: “To look for a needle in a haystack and come out with the farmer’s daughter.”

It happened to me when I went to buy a book and ended up with a bookstore instead.

Late summer, 1994. It’s one o’clock on a Monday afternoon. I’m taking a long lunch break at the local Borders. Anything I find there will be better than the ninety-page deposition sitting on my desk at the law firm. I select a thriller and head for the checkout counter when something catches my eye.

A slender paperback hangs precariously near the edge of a shelf in the business section. Its title is Old Books Into Gold: The Complete Guide to Starting a Used Books Store by Dale L. Gilbert. I scan the first paragraph.

“After a decade toiling for a Fortune 500 company,” he wrote, “I was depressed, sadly disillusioned and damn near broke after working like a fool for Big Brother.” His answer was to start a used book store from scratch.

The hook is planted firmly in my gums.

I kiss off my law career, open Bloomsday Books, and for fifteen years make a decent living buying, selling, and trading books. I find the business – except for a few grim interludes – enjoyable and always interesting.

Eventually, the onset of the internet changes the rules of open-shop bookselling and it’s time to pack up. I need something else to do. I have experience as a writer, so fictionalizing exploits for a biblio-mystery series seems a natural next step.

For my plots I recall what Robertson Davis wrote in Tempest Tost:

“Book lovers are thought by unbookish people to be gentle and unworldly and perhaps a few of them are so. But there are those who will lie and scheme and steal to get books as wildly and unconscionably as the dope-taker in pursuit of his drug.”

I select a protagonist not unlike myself, except that he is handsome, witty, and disbarred. Using far too much of his savings, he rents a building in a culturally vibrant urban community. He fills his store with books gleaned from a hundred estate sales, countless stifling attics and basements that Hannibal Lector wouldn’t be caught dead in.

The years at the shop have provided me with a palette of interesting characters and situations. There’s a prominent banker who’d rather be a Shakespearian actor, a widower who is catnip to the elderly ladies at the church across the street, an eight-year-old boy used by his father as a decoy to steal books, the derelict son of an oil magnate prone to sleeping in the back alley, and a gentle art student/barista murdered for chump change.

I remember another Monday. I’m sitting by the front window of the bookshop with a couple of customers, sipping coffee and talking politics. A car pulls up to the curb. It’s driven by a middle-aged woman with a young girl in the passenger seat. The lady, obviously drunk, gets out, drops pants, and pees on the curb. A guy driving by in a pick-up truck slams on the brakes to berate her for unseemly public behavior. The woman pulls a rake from the back of the pick-up and breaks his windshield.

Meanwhile, the teenage girl emerges from the car to ask if I have a copy of Captains Courageous by Rudyard Kipling. It’s been assigned and she needs it for class the next day. I happen to have a worn-out copy. She weeps cold tears.

I consider using that scene.

But I’m writing fiction, not a memoir. I take a bit of her DNA, plus that of a hundred others who have crossed my path, and use it to capture the essence of a noble trade that may not exist a decade from now.