The Haunted Bookshop

Aubrey Gilbert

Aubrey Gilbert reads the Help Wanted columns the way other men read adventure serials, and when a bruised head and a stray Carlyle cover point toward the Haunted Bookshop, he packs his .22 and a tube of toothpaste like a man embarking on a campaign. His instinct to play protector to Titania Chapman is inseparable from his instinct to impress her father and land an account, and he knows it. That blend of romantic self-interest and genuine nerve makes him the engine of the book's early sleuthing, even when his hunches outrun his evidence.

Roger Mifflin

Roger Mifflin presides over his Brooklyn shop like a priest over a reliquary, hand-selling O. Henry and Samuel Butler to anyone who wanders in and treating the lending of a book as a sacred trust. He is suspicious of the modern world, of publicity men, and especially of the German customer who keeps leaving packages behind, yet his hospitality is genuine and his instincts about people are sharp. His refusal to sell the Cromwell, and his mounting alarm over Weintraub's suitcase, make him both the conscience and the mystery at the center of the shop.

Titania Chapman

Titania Chapman arrives at the bookshop as a novice bookseller, cheerfully confusing Blasé Tales with The Blazed Trail and delighting in her first salary. She is the daughter of a wealthy man who cannot quite approve of her working behind a counter, and the object of Aubrey Gilbert's increasingly distracted attention. When Roger is called away, she is left holding the shop, the telephone, and a locked suitcase she has been told not to touch, which places her squarely at the hinge of the book's central peril.

Mr. Weintraub

Mr. Weintraub runs the pharmacy down the street and drifts in and out of the Haunted Bookshop with the easy familiarity of a regular, leaving a locked suitcase of old books to be called for by a friend. He writes his labels in a distinctive violet ink and eyes Aubrey with a wariness that Aubrey cannot quite explain. His presence threads the shop, the drug store, and the larger wartime anxieties of the story together, and the question of what is really inside his suitcase drives the book's middle act.

Helen Mifflin

Helen Mifflin runs the practical side of the Haunted Bookshop while Roger lectures customers and rearranges the shelves according to his latest theory of book morality. She is amused by his schemes, including his campaign to decorate Titania's room with portraits of dead authors so the girl will disdain modern suitors, but she is also the one who notices what is actually happening in the shop. Her quiet competence and dry humor give the book its domestic footing, and her presence makes Roger's eccentricities feel like a life rather than a pose.

Mr. Chapman

Mr. Chapman is a man of business who has entrusted his daughter to the Mifflins' care and is not entirely sure the arrangement was wise. He is gruff, protective, and a little baffled by Roger's refusal to advertise, but he is also capable of generosity, arriving at dinner with champagne to toast the bookshop's future. His skepticism about the whole enterprise, and his willingness to be won over, make him a useful measure of how the shop's strange world looks from the outside.