Morpheus' gifts used to come to me in bottles, Beam and black Jack Daniel's, straight up with a frosted schooner of Jax on the side, while the rain poor down in the neon glow outside the window of an all-night bar not far from the Huey Long Bridge. In a half hour I could kick open a furnace door and fling into the flames all the snakes and squeaking bats that lived inside me. Except the next morning they would writhe with new life in the ashes and come back home, stinking and hungry.
10 comments:
If it were premiers crus in a northern Michigan cafe near the Sault Ste Marie, Jim Harrison would be a lock. But Cajun, detective type, read by TY? I got nuthin.
Okay, based on the reference to the Huey Long Bridge I'm going to say Robert Penn Warren.
Calypso is on the right track.
Ric is too highbrow as usual.
Bukowski?
It has a Bukowski feel to it - soaked in booze, but I am not going to look this one up.
Continuing down the highbrow road the Matthew Brady photograph is of Civil War dead. Stephen Crane.
Note that many of the dead were stripped of their shoes and boots.
He is the perfect example of a really good writer who unfortunately just starts to repeat himself.
Now that is a common failing in great mystery writers. Maybe it is a given. But some of the greats like John D. MacDonald, Robert Parker and Nero Wolfe all did it. It takes an exceptional talent like Elmore Leonard or Loren D. Estelman to avoid that trap.
Unfortunately this guy doesn't. None the less I highly reccomend his novels. The first eight of them anyway.
Alcoholism is more common than hair loss among writers. The nifty thing about being a writer is that you get to present your rather banal struggle with the problems concurrent with heavy drinking as some me kind of mighty struggle with the forces of darkness. You ever hear the one about where the poet throws himself before the Lord and says "I'm the greatest sinner ever". The Lord replies "Nonsense, little man, you're nothing of the kind".......This could be a quote from any number of writers.
Note that many of the dead were stripped of their shoes and boots.
Waste not. Want not. The living couldn't order new shoes from Amazon or zip on down to the nearest WalMart, so they wisely reused them from those who would not longer be using them.
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