The Thrift Shop Murders

At a dinner party hosted by millionaire Fairfield Dixon in his luxurious, art-filled mansion, the talk is surprisingly freewheeling and boisterous. Selwyn McCandless, the manager of a large brokerage firm, and his wife, Virginia, are among the guests. As the conversation rattles on, growing ever more risqu and bawdy, Selwyn becomes increasingly mortified; he resolves to say something that will return civility and decorum to the proceedings. At the conclusion of his peroration, a shot rings out. Someone has been fatally wounded. Is there any cause-and-effect between Selwyn's comments and the fatal shot? For the rest of his life, he will fear that there is. During the days that follow the fateful night, he receives a letter saying that the clues to receiving large portions of Fairfield Dixon's wealth will be found in the city's thrift shops. The letter, he realizes has been carbon-copied to all the people who were at dinner, that night. But Selwyn McCandless is a busy man: a dapper dresser, a conservative company- type, a not-too-imaginative person who, day after day, guides the investments of others. What will it take for him to leave his protected, corporate world, and become someone who prowls among -- lowers himself to -- cast-offs in dingy thrift shops? Selwyn's son, meanwhile, a veritable connoisseur of thrift shops, has been working on the crew that is building a new museum for Fairfield Dixon's art. Unlike his father, Marvin McCandless gets his hands dirty. And that fact eventually leads him to become a suspect in the murder, and to be subjected to repeated questioning. This is a whodunit, and to give away more of the plot would ruin it. But THRIFT SHOP MURDERS is much more than a whodunit. In its many threads, it is a reflection on materiality -- Americans' love of money and stuff -- versus spirituality; on effete and anonymous corporate power versus hard, dirty manual labor; on being controlled by abstract finance versus controlling one's own surroundings through craft; in the end, on what makes value . . . valuable. If a thing had one value when it was new, what is its value now that it has been relegated to a thrift shop? What is the worth . . . of worth? Yes, in the end, the original murder -- as well as the ones that follow -- are solved, and all the threads neatly woven together.

The author has worked and/or written for The New York Review of Books, The New York Free Press, and Cavalier, and has been published in the Kenyon, New England, and Wisconsin Reviews, Tango News, and elsewhere. His books include Symphony, Restaurant, Benny’s Mission, and Three Sexes in Search of the Creddlebones (novels), Terminal Vibrato, House of Travels (short stories), Blocking Out the Symptoms (plays), Making Up for Lost Dreams (poems), and The Elements of Style: Updated and Annotated for Present-Day Use (grammar and style). He has had nine productions of his plays in NYC, has played, and taught, jazz piano professionally, and is daffy about baseball.