LIFE OF INTRIGUE: ON FATHERS, PAPERBACKS, AND UNSOLVABLE MYSTERIES

Full story originally appeared in The Metropolitan Review.

What a man can’t remember, doesn’t exist for him.

—Robert Ludlum, The Bourne Identity

The news came by text from my older sister. Just had a policeman at the door. Dad died. Found deceased in his apt. No other details yet. I was grocery shopping with my daughter, and she was growing impatient, squirming in her stroller. I quickly wrote back: Thanks for letting me know. Call you later. I tried calling my sister that night, but she didn’t answer. I didn’t call again.

My father’s death didn’t come as a shock. Months before, he’d been hospitalized for respiratory failure, his lungs ravaged from decades of smoking, his cirrhotic liver barely functioning. He’d pulled through that time, but by all reports, just barely.

I hadn’t seen or spoken to him in almost two decades. What scarce information I had about his life in recent times came filtered through my sister, who still lived back in Nova Scotia. She too knew very little. For years, he’d resided in the same rented basement room in Lower Sackville. By his landlady’s account, he never went anywhere, never saw anyone, mostly drifted back and forth between his room and the house’s back porch, where he was permitted to smoke. Occasionally he’d head out at night then make a noisy return, stumbling and lurching around down there. Sometimes he did the landlady’s laundry for her. But as far as she knew, he spent the entirety of his days alone, reading.

Reading, always reading, was how I remembered him: on the loveseat in our upstairs den, the television on but with volume low, eyes on a paperback. Or on a plastic recliner on the beach at our cottage in Pictou, a beer always at hand, butting his cigarettes in the sand. For hours he’d sit like that, immovable and unapproachable, reading in silence.

It took my sister less than an hour to gather his belongings and clean out his room. The only furnishings were a twin bed, a television, the hot plate where he warmed up canned meals, a single chair — the recliner where he sat and read for hours every day.

His landlady had also packed up several boxes of books, all cheap paperbacks. Here were names familiar to me from family bookshelves, long ago. Titans of espionage and suspense: John le Carré, Len Deighton, Ken Follett, Robert Ludlum. Blockbuster procedurals: John Grisham, Tom Clancy. Tech-infused spine-tinglers: Michael Crichton and the like. Eric Van Lustbader. Clive Cussler. Mass-market thrillers from drugstore racks: J. D. Robb, James Patterson.

These authors are of my father’s generation, the postwar boom that generated, dominated, and profited from much of 20th-century popular culture. Most of the books we found in his apartment were subgrade later entries from these authors’ bibliographies, when their names had been established as marketable brands, producing endlessly iterative franchises: Tom Clancy’s Net Force, Ludlum’s Covert-One, the endless reincarnations and redeployments of Jason Bourne and Alex Cross.

In the weeks following my father’s death, I became drawn to these books, perhaps hoping to understand why they’d captured his interest when so much else in his life — family, friends, any lasting connections to this world — he’d cast aside.

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