I'm up to #15 in rereading the Travis McGee series by John D.
MacDonald: THE TURQUOISE LAMENT (1973). It's a fine one.
McGee is called by a young woman, the daughter of someone who
once saved his life, because she's in trouble. He goes and
sorts things out, but we know, and McGee soon realizes, that
she's heading off into even worse trouble, and there's
nothing he can do about it. McGee gets pretty low for part of
it, and lacerates himself over his behaviour and cheap
womanizing. His philosophizing never bores, whether he's
musing about modern airplanes and hotels or the nature of
integrity. Some of the social commentary has turned into
social history--and is none the less interesting--but most of
it is still dead on the money. I'd just finished reading a
dense book about academia and this was the perfect
tonic.
There's a fight at the end, of course, and McGee takes one on
the noggin:
"The sky spun over and around me, and there was a ringing
crack of my skull against the stone, a dim and distant
roughness against my cheek."
What's the name for it when articles are left out of a
sentence? McGee would more often phrase this as "there was
ringing crack of skull against stone, dim and distant
roughness against cheek." There isn't a lot of that in this
book.
Bill
-- William Denton : Toronto, Canada : http://www.miskatonic.org/ : Caveat lector.
-- # Plain ASCII text only, please. Anything else won't show up. # 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 : 07 May 2004 EDT