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There aren’t many private eyes in Belfast, and now, apparently there’s one fewer. I know this because his shop was right next to mine. His name was Malcolm Carlyle and he seemed a decent sort. He would call in for a chat and a browse now and again when business was slow. His business, that is. His business was called Private Eye, big yellow letters on a black background. Then one day he didn’t open up, and I never saw him again, and that was the start of my problems because he was still listed in the Yellow Pages, but when people couldn’t get a response on the phone well, they thought, he must be good, he’s so busy, he’s changed his number, gone ex-directory, so they’d come down to check what was happening with their cases, find the door locked, stand back and take a look at the place and see my shop next door and think there must be some kind of a connection because you don’t have a shop called Private Eye and a shop called No Alibis sitting side by side for no reason as all. So they’d come in and furtively browse through the crime books, all the time eyeing me up behind the counter, trying to work out if I could possibly be connected to the private eye they were looking for and if there was a connecting door between the shops, and whether I did this bookselling thing as a kind of respectable cover for my night-time manoeuvres on the cold, dark streets of Belfast. They’d gotten it wrong of course. Bookselling is more cut-throat than you can possibly imagine. The first fella who actually approached me was called Robert Geary; he was a civil servant in the Department of Education in Bangor, he was married, he had three children aged from nine to twelve and he supported Manchester United. We all have our crosses to bear. He told me all this while making a meal out of paying for an Agatha Christie novel, so I knew something was up. No one had bought a Christie in years. Reading Group Discussion Guide
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