They say the devil knows you're dead, and he knows it right
away. And if you have doubts about John D., he pays you a
visit.
Last night, after a hot and humid day that continued into the
late hours, I went to the library looking for something quick
to read. I brought down an old volume called _The Delights of
Detection_, edited by Jacques Barzun.
After reading the introduction, the intelligent rant of a
partisan about detection versus crime fiction, I glued on to
_The Homesick Buick_ by our man John D. I don't remember
reading this story before. It is one of the author's best,
and the funniest one I know. It tells the story of a
perfectly executed bank heist in a small town. Here's
MacDonald's irony in the first paragraph:
"To get to Leeman, Texas, you go southwest from Beaumont on
Route 90 for approximately thirty miles and then turn right
on a two-lane concrete farm road. Five minutes from the time
you turn, you will reach Leeman. The main part of town is six
lanes wide and five blocks long. If the hand of a careless
giant should remove the six gas stations, the two theaters,
Willows's Hardware Store, the Leeman National Bank,the two
big air-conditioned five-and-dimes, the Sears store, four
caf鳬 Rightsinger's dress shop, and The Leeman House, a
twenty-room hotel, there would be very little left except the
supermarket and four assorted drugstores."
Barzun has a narrow view of crime literature; he obviously
prefers Sherlock Holmes to Hoke Mosely and the clean
detection tale to the dirty doings of real criminals. Yet he
picked this gem of a story with a gem of a title and for
that, I thank him.
If ever rara-avis puts out or organizes a short-story
anthology, this will be my proposed entry.
Best regards,
MrT
=====
"The skill of man is unequal to the formation of a new man
from old materials, but the battered tenement may, with care,
be long sustained by props" -- From Becklard's
Physiology.
__________________________________________________ Do You
Yahoo!? Yahoo! Health - Feel better, live better http://health.yahoo.com
-- # To unsubscribe from the regular list, say "unsubscribe rara-avis" to # majordomo@icomm.ca. This will not work for the digest version. # The web pages for the list are at http://www.miskatonic.org/rara-avis/ .
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : 06 Aug 2002 EDT