Arthur W. Upfield (1890–1964) was an Australian writer of mystery and suspense novels, best known for books featuring his creation, Detective Inspector Napoleon Bonaparte of the Queensland Police Force. His works were highly acclaimed and popular, but nothing in this article should be taken as my personal recommendation of them since I've never read one. My mother though read several and enjoyed them greatly…which brings us to a tale from Christmas of 1963.
At the time, I was avidly collecting comic books, primarily from two sources. One was just buying them new. Comics then came out on Tuesdays and Thursdays and were sold in drug stores, supermarkets and dedicated newsstands. It was an absolute "must" of my life to hit such establishments on those days, preferably at about the time the employees were unbundling that day's shipment and putting them in the rack.
The other source was used bookstores, of which there were then many. I believe at some point it was an "easy entry" business, meaning it didn't cost much to start one. You just needed a rented store, a lot of shelves and a ton of old books. I'd hit these establishments up often and buy old comic books, which were then a nickel each and, in most shops, six for a quarter. There are comics I bought that way and still own that are now worth mucho dinero.
My father usually drove me to these stores and every once in a while, my mother would come along and buy herself an Upfield novel. They usually had a lot of them and she'd buy one or two to read.
My mother was different from me in many ways and this was one. I would have bought them all. That is, I would have bought copies of every Upfield book I saw but did not yet own and then I would have just read them at my leisure. I'm not sure I can explain why she didn't do that. It wasn't the money. Used, the books only sold for one or two dimes each.
Sometimes when I was heading off to prowl old book shops, she'd say, "Hey, if you see any Upfield books I don't have, please buy one for me." She gave me a list of those she owned, which was about eight of the books the man had published. That gave me an idea for her Christmas present that year. I decided I would get her The Complete Arthur W. Upfield Library, meaning one copy of every one of his books she didn't have. These are all paperbacks we're talking about so they weren't expensive but there was the challenge of getting them all…and I had about three weeks.
I walked up to my favorite bookstore up on Pico Boulevard which sold used books but could also order new ones for you. The proprietor had a reference volume that showed me the names of all the books Mr. Upfield had published. Some were on his shelves. Some others were still in print so I had him place orders for those. When I left, I had ten of those books either in my mitts or on their way to me. Over the next few days, I hit three other shops I frequented and found six more of them. Then a sweep of three stores downtown near MacArthur Park yielded only one more.
I had let my father in on my mission, of which he highly approved, and swore him to secrecy. He drove me to some of those stores where I bought old comics and then I got him to drive me to two stores I never visited because they didn't carry comics. Fortunately, each of those deprived bookstores did have some Upfield books.
Christmas Day that year fell on a Wednesday. I remembered that and I just looked it up to check and I was right. So my deadline was Tuesday and when I awoke Tuesday morning, I had procured all but one of the books. I suppose my mother would have been just as delighted by a Christmas gift of The Complete Arthur W. Upfield Library (minus one) with an I.O.U. but I was determined to find the last one that day. Oddly enough, it was one of the more recent ones. Earlier Upfield books were still in print but not this one, the name of which I do not now recall.
I had one last store to search — a place called Yesterday's Books down on Western Avenue. It was a big, frightening place with books filling three floors of a structure that should have been condemned long before I or Mr. Upfield were born. Their inventory was largely unsorted and as I entered, I had the feeling that the book I needed was definitely in there somewhere. The formidable challenge was to find it.
I had given myself an arbitrary time limit there of 45 minutes. That was how long it would be before my father came back to pick me up. I asked the proprietor where books by Arthur W. Upfield might be and was disheartened by his reply: "Almost anywhere." I could search all I wanted but he was not going to be of any help whatsoever.
So I searched and I searched and I did find numerous Upfield books but not the one I needed. Fifteen minutes went by…thirty…I could hear the seconds ticking away on me. Every time I came across the wrong Upfield book, it bolstered my certainty that the right one was hiding somewhere on the premises. But could I find it in time?
Forty-two minutes after I began searching, I moved a stack of dusty volumes and there under it, deliberately hiding from me, I saw what I saw: The missing Upfield book. Feelings of triumph and joy overwhelmed me as I grabbed it up —
— only to find it was not the book. Just the cover. The insides had come loose and were nowhere to be found. Damn.
I was about to admit defeat when it suddenly dawned on me that I didn't have to do that. Why surrender when you can lie?
Well, maybe not lie but buy myself some time. I remembered where in the store I'd last come across an Upfield book that I already had. I took it and the loose cover to the cash register and asked the guy how much for the both of them. He just charged me for the complete book and threw the cover in for nothing. In the car, I proudly informed my father I had found the last book in my quest. No point in letting him in on the fraud I was about to perpetrate.
Once home, I got some glue and a knife and performed surgery. I removed the cover from the whole book and glued the loose cover onto it. What I wound up with looked just like a real copy of the last book I needed to complete The Complete Arthur W. Upfield Library…as long as you didn't open it.
Then I gift-wrapped the entire pile and stuck it under the tree. Every so often that evening, I'd catch a glimpse of the present and I'd have an ominous flash-forward: My mother would open it up, love the present I'd so ambitiously assembled for her…but say, "Hey, there's something odd about this one book…"
The next morning, she was thrilled with what I'd gotten her. Beaming with joy, she went over to a bookcase in the living room, rearranged a few things so as to clear space and placed her Upfield collection there, spines out, all lined up and looking very official.
Since the stand-in book was one of the later ones, I said to her, "If I were you, I'd start at the beginning and read them all in sequence, including the ones I already read." She said that sounded like a peachy idea and I breathed a sigh of relief. That meant I had several months before she got to it — several months to find a real copy and make the switch. Three or four weeks later, on a hunt for comic books I didn't have in a store in Santa Monica, I found a real copy and swapped it in. "She'll never know," I thought to myself.
Forty or forty-five years later, we were having dinner one night. My father was gone by then and my mother and I didn't talk too much about the past because it sometimes caused her to miss him a little too much. But that evening, she started remembering fond moments from past holidays and I decided it was time to unburden my secret and to confess my little bit of chicanery involving her Upfield books.
"I had found all but one," I explained to her, "and time was running out…"
She finished my sentence: "…so you somehow made a fake book with the right cover but the wrong insides. Then later, you found a copy of the real book and secretly switched them on the shelf."
I was startled…truly startled. I asked her "How did you know?" but all she'd do was smile and tell me, "I knew."
I never could lie to my mother.