I finished Lionel White's Hostage for a Hood yesterday. It
was good, maybe very good. One thing that really struck me
was how Gold Medal novels finish. Screw summing up or
offering a cool down period at the end. The climactic action
goes up until the last page. There is only half a page after
that to wind things up. And then it's over.
I also liked how White kept track of how things vibrated out
from earlier acts, anything from a stray dog dragging around,
then dropping a chewed up scarf to coming back to note a
widow grieving over a character killed pretty early on.
However, the real reason I'm writing is to once again expose
my lack of gun knowledge and ask a question. White refers to
a cop's riot gun. What is this? I thought it was a pump
action shotgun, but it shoots bullets not buckshot. If this
is the case, did cops really shoot bullets into crowds of
rioters as late as the 1950s (seems to me there would have
been a lot more death in the civil rights movement if they
did), or did it just retain the name from an earlier
time?
Mark
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