Booked.

I am in Powell's Burnham Park bookstore, just south of the Loop in Chicago, on a book crawl, and I am thinking of Bruce Cook, friend, and novelist who died in Los Angeles last November. He was best known (under the nom de guerre of Bruce Alexander) for his ten Sir John Fielding mysteries of eighteenth-century London and for his four novels about Chico Cervantes, an L.A. private eye who, as one reviewer noted, liked both Scotch and Cuervo Gold. It was in this bookstore, not far from where I am standing, that he handed me a copy of Rachel Ingalls's Mrs. Caliban and said with a shake of the head, "You might like this." I certainly did. If I had been writing his obituary, I would have tried to slip in somewhere: "He loved secondhand bookstores, and, when not at work on his own books, spent as much time as he could in them. Though smiles didn't come easily, with a book in his hand he always looked a happy man."

We met in Chicago in the early sixties, when Bruce was, as he once told a reporter, working "in all the public relations pits" in the city. He was also free-lancing as often as he could, writing for a number of magazines, including Commonweal. We hit it off immediately, surprised--at least I was--to find someone else who liked to spend the better part of a Saturday looking at row after row of used books. In those days we liked to drive out to the South Side along Lake Shore Drive to Hyde Park and O'Gara's on 53th Street. O'Gara's was one of those bookstores that seemed never to have any book but the one you never expected to find.

Most people, I've noticed, like to go it alone in secondhand bookstores. I do myself. When you're with another person, there's always a chance that he may be after the same book you have just managed to tug out from between its high-shouldered neighbors. Under such circumstances, it's difficult to look each other in the face. Plus, if you don't find the right book, you feel let down not just by the bookstore, but by the person you're with, especially if he has recommended the store as a sure thing. But Bruce and I never had these problems.

We lost track of each other during the seventies and eighties. Bruce left Chicago for Washington in 1968 to write for the National Observer, and later worked as a critic and reviewer on magazines and newspapers in New York, Detroit, and Los Angeles. He also began to publish books, the first, The Beat Generation, in 1971. He was beginning to experience national success. But I couldn't help wondering what he was finding in those secondhand bookstores he was haunting.

But, one afternoon in the 1990s, I happened to be walking past the window of our local Barnes & Noble in Evanston, Illinois, when I saw that Bruce Cook was going to be reading from and signing copies of a reprint of The Beat Generation. The time had come to reconnect.

We started seeing each other off and on (his mother was in a retirement home in Evanston), and a couple of times I went out to Los Angeles, where he and his second wife were living in a classic Raymond Chandler house. I think I was a little suspicious of L.A., that its sprawl would harbor none of those book bastions of dust and defeat and rejection, of surprise and renewal and joy. I couldn't help remembering the Chico Cervantes soliloquy in Bruce's Mexican Standoff about Los Angeles: "hanging over everything, heavier than the smog, is an atmosphere of free-floating, brain-rattling paranoia." I should have realized that this was hard-boiled L.A. detective writing, and that secondhand bookstores don't change much from place to place.

He introduced me to Dutton's in San Fernando Valley and to Michael Thompson's on West 3rd Street. Best of all, though, was a hole-in-the-wall book bindery on Melrose Avenue that would have been easy to walk past. There I unearthed an early biography (1926) of Rimbaud that I had despaired of finding--one of those fountain-of-youth moments. We even met in London, in 1995, when Blind Justice, Bruce's first Sir John Fielding mystery, was published in England. Though drinking glasses of flat white wine by the evening Thames was of some interest, what really excited us both, I think, was the discovery of two secondhand treasures--the Gloucester Road Bookshop and John Thornton on Fulham Road.

Then death came, cruelly, with unpublished and unfinished books, with more Chico Cervantes planned, and with other secondhand bookstores to be discovered. I'm sorry that I never had a chance to introduce Bruce to the Renaissance Book Shop, Inc., in Milwaukee. There I found three of John Braine's later novels, books that are hard to find and, I later learned, just as hard to read.

It would have been good to share another excitement and another disappointment with Bruce. He would have understood both.

Harold Bordwell is a retired editor living in Evanston, Illinois.