A motley overflow crowd of celebrity mystery writers and loyal customers gathered at the Mystery Bookstore in Los Angeles last night to mourn the closing of the beloved indie that served the community for over 20 years. Bestselling author Robert Crais stood among hundreds of well-wishers and commented on the loss of the last independent bookstore in the center of the city. “This leaves a hole in the heart of Los Angeles bookselling,” he said, comforting a weeping Linda Brown, longtime staffer at the store. “Bookstores are the culture of our lives, and we can’t afford to lose any more of them. This is bad.” The long line of customers at the cash register clearly indicated that having the ability to browse freely among bookshelves is less of a nostalgic reaction to the Internet than an authentic desire among booklovers to participate in the community nurtured in bricks and mortar bookstores.
“This is where I did my first book signing 19 years ago,” said a somber Michael Connelly, who flew in from Florida for the party, “and I’ve held them here for all of my 21 books since then. My career was built on the author buzz generated by stores like this, and now new authors will have to be fostered by the Internet instead. This is personal; the Internet is faceless.”
The Mystery Bookstore was purchased from a consortium of investors in 2008 by Kirk Pasich and Pam Woods, who cite Amazon and big-box discounters as the reasons for the closure. Pasich, an attorney with roots in the entertainment industry, said, “We wish we could have kept it going, but we’re caught in the times we live in. Mystery authors are the nicest and most decent people we’ve ever met; we just fell in love with them. Now I’m not sure if it’s good or bad to be the last owners of this really special place.” He and Woods will donate much of the remaining stock in the store to the USO, the VA Hospital in Los Angeles, and various public libraries.
As a bottle of Grey Goose vodka made its way through the throngs of people, among them mystery writers Gary Phillips, Denise Hamilton, Greg Hurwitz, Paul Levine, Lee Goldberg, Stephen Jay Schwartz, and Dick Lochte, customer Mark Ward noted that the Mystery Bookstore will always hold special memories for him as a place where he brought his daughter when she was a little girl. “As a parent, I could always find interesting books for her that I wouldn’t have known about otherwise. They really curated the children’s section here, and the advice I received from the staff about books was incredibly meaningful to us.”
