“I drink gin at lunch, whisky in the evening….Three glasses, sometimes four. I sit reading, smoking, listening to the radio or to music and let my senses tilt steadily over into mild and delicious inebriation, hearing the wind-thud, the hoarse sea heaving outside.” It’s 1977 and 69-year-old Amory Clay is thinking about her life and journaling. The book goes back and forth in time. from her self-imposed exile on a remote Hebridean island, to reveries about the main events of her life. Born in 1908, […]
What could possibly go wrong?
Delirium gets it in her spoinky rainbow-colored head that she needs to find her long lost brother Destruction. After going to see her sisters Desire and Despair, who turn her down when she asks for their help, she has little choice but to put her fervent request to her brother Dream. Three hundred years ago, Destruction gave up his realm and asked his siblings to consider the same, but if not, to at least respect his wishes. Dream reminds Del of this fact, but she […]
Your French methods are surprising
“Rene looked more hatchet-faced than usual.” This is my favorite Maigret yet. Our esteemed Inspector is only a whisper in the first ninety-some pages of this book: is he the “Broad-shouldered man”? No matter, there’s a cracking good mystery going on here. The setting is Liege, Simenon’s birthplace, and his intimate knowledge of the town and it’s underbelly really gives depth and quite a bit of humor to this story. Jean and Rene are a couple of young men out on the town. Jean works in […]
And that was how Maigret began his investigation by helping bring a pure-bred Friesian calf into the world
A man is shot to death outside his home late one night and the French lecturer on forensic and theoretical police work who had been staying with the dead man’s family has been asked to stay in the picture postcard little village in Holland while the investigation takes place. The lecturer, Jean Duclos, through the University of Nancy where he teaches, has requested that someone from the French police to come and assist in the investigation.The task falls on Maigret, who makes his unofficial visit […]
We were all trying strenuously to walk on the wild side
Brad Gooch met Howard Brookner at a gay club in 1978. Howard was working on his film project about William S. Burroughs and Brad was a post-grad student at Columbia and writer. The heady swirl of the hedonistic 70’s was everywhere and they were firmly part of it. Burroughs, Mapplethorpe, Haring. It was all sex and drugs and art with a capital A and the possibilities were seemingly endless. Then the spectre of death in the form of AIDs transformed the landscape forever. In between, […]
One silent gift
It’s 1914 in Paterson, New Jersey. Constance Kopp and her sisters Norma and Fleurette have taken their horse and buggy into town to do some shopping. Suddenly one of those newfangled motorcars plows right into them, damaging the buggy beyond repair. It’s a miracle the women themselves have survived with relatively minor injuries. People in the street help extricate them, right the horse and retrieve the remnants of their ruined buggy. The driver of the motorcar is Henry Kaufman, who runs the family silk dyeing factory […]
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