“What do you figure it is, people with fond memories of the TV show? I came in the back door-I hated the TV show, but I started reading A. A. Fair and decided, gee, the guy can write, let’s see what he’s like under his own name. And it turns out they’re tough and fast-paced and sassy, not like the television crap at all.”

We had a nice conversation, the kind I’d had in mind when I bought the store, and then after she left, the flower matron, Maggie Mason by name, brought up her treasure trove and wrote out a check for $228.35, which is what those twelve books came to with tax. “I hope Raffles gets a commission on this,” she said. “I must have passed this store a hundred times, but it was seeing him that made me come in. He’s a wonderful cat.”

He is, but how could the ebullient Ms. Mason possibly know that? “Thank you,” I said. “He’s a hard worker, too.”

He hadn’t changed position since she came in, except to preen a little while she’d cooed at him. My irony was unintentional-he is a hard worker, maintaining Barnegat Books as a wholly rodent-free ecosystem-but it was lost on her anyway. She had, she assured me, the greatest respect for working cats. And off she went, bearing two shopping bags and a perfectly radiant smile.

She had barely cleared the threshold when my third customer approached, a faint smile on his face. “Raffles,” he said, “is a splendid name for that cat.”

“Thank you.”

“And appropriate, I’d say.”

What exactly did he mean by that? A. J. Raffles was a character in a book, and the cat was in a bookshop, but that fact alone made the name no more appropriate than Queequeg, say, or Arrow-smith. But A. J. Raffles was also a gentleman burglar, an amateur cracksman, while I was a cracksman myself, albeit a professional.

And how did this chap, white-haired, slight of build, thin as a stick, and very nattily if unseasonably turned out in a suit of brown herringbone tweed and a Tattersall vest-how did he happen to know all this?