Location Is Everything

After bidding a melancholy good-bye earlier this month to the original Murder One, a respected bookstore in London’s Charing Cross Road owned by Maxim Jakubowski, I was pleased to receive the first newsletter from the new Murder One, now a mail-order business specializing in crime and thriller fiction.

It seems that the new premises of Murder One are located in an oddly apt area of the British capital. The newsletter explains:

Finally! It seems like ages since the bookstore closed (it’s still hard to believe) and we settled into our own small office space in Hoxton Square. We’ve even had some visits from customers wanting to browse books in our new bookshop! (We had to let them down gently that there were no books at all to look at in our office. I offered tea, but without books, it wasn’t a good enough reason to stick around.) However, we feel we have moved into the right area: there were recently two break-ins (one after the other, if you can believe it) to the same office one floor beneath us. Three guys (all caught on CCTV and looking suspiciously like they just stepped out of Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels) stole a bunch of desktop computers, laptops and servers.

What a great place for Murder One. Perfect!

This newsletter represents a selection (I hope quite a comprehensive selection) of January and February crime and romance titles. Because we no longer have the store, I’m going to send out two weeks’ worth of upcoming titles to make ordering easier for you, so you’ll know what is due to be published. ...

We’ve managed, as well, to lower our prices. The areas you’ll really notice the price reduction will be on American paperbacks at $6.99, which are now re-priced from £6.99 to £5.99, and all our specialist crime trade paper publications from favourites Rue Morgue and Felony & Mayhem, priced in America at $14.99, now sold at £11.99 (down from the bookshop’s price £12.99).

Also, keep an eye out for a better, more user-friendly website with book covers and blurbs at the end of the month. This will likely make shopping with us a whole lot easier, now that we are without a bookshop. And the new catalogue will also be sent out to you at the end of the month.

Far be it from me to play promoter for Trisha Taleb and Tanya Stone, the two longtime Jakubowski employees who now own this mail-order business. But considering the collapse of the Pound Sterling and impatience among Americans who don’t wish to wait for U.S. editions of UK crime-fiction titles, news of this new mail-order option might be welcome, indeed. And if you’re in London, you can stop by Murder One’s East End offices every Friday and Saturday from noon to 7 p.m. to avoid shipping charges.

More information is available here.