Sherlocking in Houston
By Don Hobbs

Last week found me in the Bayou City - Houston, Texas. I was training Voice Recognition to a group of radiologist sdown there. It was a three-day gig and I was alone. This allowed me to venture off to Houston's numerous bookstores without boring any of my co-workers. It was a rough three-day workweek. I trained two radiologists and visited and called in at seven bookstores. This is perfect ratio of work to pleasure.  I was actually supposed to train more doctors and visit less bookstores but it just did not work out that way.

Houston is the nation's fourth largest city and it's urban sprawl is only less that Los Angeles. Houston's famed medical community is a very tight group of hospitals, all within a couple of square miles. The hospital where I was training was not part of the Houston medical scene but the radiologists are part of it. The majority of the group decided they did not want to be bothered with the forty-five minutes it takes to get to where I was training. The group consists of fifteen doctors but only the two newest radiologists are required to make the journey.  So, because thirteen did not want to be bothered, I had a great week.

I visited Murder By The Book, Houston's only mystery bookshop. I did not find anything there that I could not read or that I did not already own. The person working there actually remembered me. I was in there back in March and bought On the Wrong Track by Steve Hockensmith. We started talking about foreign translations of the Canon while I was checking out. He told me about a customer talking about someone in Dallas with thousands of translations. I introduced myself as that person and we had a good laugh about the smallness of planet Earth. It is good to be remembered.

I visited three of Houston's seven Half-Priced Books and picked up several anthologies with Sacred Writings in them but again, I had them all and bought them as gifts and replacement copies.  As I was leaving one of the HPB's I passed Libre Española and decided to stop. I got there five minutes before closing. I was met by the nicest, elderly couple. I explained in my best broken Spanish what I was looking for and I was rewarded with their broken English that their computer showed one book in the store that met my criteria. I apologized for keeping them past closing but they insisted that between the three of us we should be able to track down one little book.

After ten minutes, Senor Garza exclaimed loudly, "AQUÍ!" In his hand was Estudio en Escarlata published in Santiago, Chili in 1994 by Pehuén Editores. This is a Spanish version of  A Study in Scarlet translated by Camlio Germedia. It is 220 pages in length and is nicely illustrated by Julio Palazuelos. Anna and Felix Garza seemed very pleased that I came into their shop and we talked for another fifteen minutes We probably understood thirty-five per-cent of what each other said and they offered to order more Spanish translations for my next visit.

One never knows what they will find when entering a bookshop. The ones I found in Houston proved to be excellent, just like my workweek.

Happy Collecting!!