I’m busy cataloging books and getting ready for the busy weekend, but have made time to preview another book from the Using Books booth at the Seattle Antiquarian Book Fair:

Squeeze Play by Paul Benjamin [Paul Auster]
The early publishing history of Squeeze Play — Paul Auster’s attempt to make a quick buck with a commercial detective novel — could almost be the basis of its own detective novel. Its publisher printed the book but wasn’t able to distribute it, and when Auster found a paperback publisher to reissue it, he was contractually obligated to split the small advance with the original absentee publisher.

Auster is dismissive of the book’s merits. He writes that, “As an example of the genre, it seemed no worse than many others I had read.” But Squeeze Play is genuinely interesting — as a meta-source for his books’ recurring themes of identity and authorship, and as a satisfying detective story. Even with it’s hard-boiled overtones, it would fit comfortably into a collection of The New York Trilogy as Volume Zero.

This is a later edition, published in 1990 after he’d found some success, but before he outed himself as the book’s author in 1997. The author’s note reads, “Paul Benjamin is the pseudonym for a celebrated contemporary American writer.”