This is a message I attempted to post last week but to my
knowledge did not appear. If it did and I repeat, my
apologies.
As I have mentioned before, I am a big Ross Thomas fan. Even
his weakest novels, and several are quite flawed, have
characters, descriptions, or pieces of business that linger
in my memory.
For example, THE MONEY HARVEST has a marvelous opening with a
93 year old advisor to presidents by the name of Crawdad
Gilmore. This is a classic Washington type (think Clark
Clifford) and in a handful of pages Thomas paints a vivid
portrait of him. Here is a sample:
"Long ago he had discovered that there really wasn't much to
be done about pain, since it refused to be ignored, other
than to be polite to it--maybe offer it a toddy or two and
hope that it would go back where it came from, probably next
door, because he now thought of pain as some nasty, despised
neighbor that time had turned into his last
acquaintance."
Great stuff! Unfortunately, Thomas kills him off in the first
chapter. The only consolation is the rich description of the
funeral that opens the second chapter:
"The funerals of old-timers who have lusted after power, and
who may even have bedded her for a while, serve a useful
purpose in the District of Columbia. They provide a kind of
neutral watering hole where the political animals who inhabit
the Washington jungle can gather to eye each other and to
mark the absence of other old-timers whose strange alarums
and mad excursions once echoed through what's left of the
rain forest that stretches along the banks of the Potomac.
The old-timers, of course, are those who have lived in
Washington for half a dozen years or so."
Going back to refresh my memory of these opening pages, it
was all I could do not be suckered into reading THE MONEY
HARVEST again, even though it is one of Thomas' weakest. It
would be more fun to reread AH, TREACHERY again or TWILIGHT
AT MAC'S PLACE.
There are certain "Washingtons" that Thomas understands and
portrays better than anyone. These include the intelligence
community, military (retired and active), consultants,
journalists and various other official and unofficial,
overlapping subsections of the establishment. Thomas was a
consultant in a variety of forms including elections (foreign
and domestic) and public relations/public affairs. I have
worked with or passed through enough of these worlds myself
to recognize the depth of his knowledge and the richness of
his portrayals. He is widely thought to have had more than a
passing relationship with the intelligence community. Being a
consultant is a great cover, as is being a writer (see Howard
Hunt and Charles McCarry).
While I consider the non-Washington novels, on average, of
higher quality, I have a special love for those based in DC.
I've even spent some pleasant lunch hours wandering the area
where Thomas placed "Mac's Place in the McCorkle and Padillo
novels. It's "a few blocks north of K Street and a little
less than that west of Connecticut Avenue." So I wander up
19th Street past the power lunch restaurants and zig zag
along N Street and Jefferson Place. The area, especially
19th, has changed a great deal in recent years but I still
feel connection to Thomas on those strolls, especially when I
spot someone who might have stepped from his pages.
Richard Moore
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