Whose that author?

 “Wait a minute,” Raymond said. “No, I think the way we ought to do it—pick up the gun and hold it at your side. Go ahead. I think that’ll be better.” Raymond brought the Colt toward him and held it pointing down, the barrel extending below the edge of the desk. “Yeah, that’s better. See, then when you bring it up you have to clear the desk and there’s less chance of getting shot in the balls.” “Come on,” Clement said, “cut the shit.” “All right, then you reach for yours and I raise mine,” Raymond said, “it’s up to you.” He waited. Clement’s right hand edged over to the Walther, touched it, hesitated, then covered the grip and brought it toward him, off the table. He said, “I don’t believe this.” “Okay, you ready?” Raymond said. “Any time you want, do it.” “Wait just a minute,” Clement said.

Whose that author?

 

“Unless it’s an old man selling apples at the corner of Broad and Chestnut Streets, Philadelphia, on a cold winter day, I can’t think of anything more pathetic than setting out with the Brooklyn Dodgers for another season.” His cigarette was out so he lit another and continued. The words came faster. “Who’ve they got this year? For pitchers, Jake Kennedy, Frenchie De Voe, Harry Norman, Rats Doyle, Sam Henderson, ‘Fat Stuff’ Foster, and Razzle Nugent. Except for Nugent, Foster is the best of a bad lot. He had the best record last summer when he lost twenty games and won ten. That means the Dodgers are exactly half a game behind every time he takes the mound. They have a rookie from Elmira trying for shortstop, two new outfielders from the Pacific Coast, and a kid from somewhere up in Connecticut without any big-league experience who’s supposed to pitch them into the Series. Maybe.”

Whose that author?

 

I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path. Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain.

Whose that author?

I was startled from a solid sleep by Jamie exploding out of bed beside me. This wasn’t an uncommon occurrence, but as usual, it left me sitting bolt upright amid the quilts, dry-mouthed and completely dazed, heart hammering like a drill-press.

He was already down the stairs; I heard the thump of his bare feet on the last few treads—and above that sound, frenzied pounding on the front door. A ripple of unrest spread through the house: rustling bedclothes, sleepy voices, opening doors.

I shook my head violently and flung off the covers. Him or me? was the first coherent thought that formed out of the fog drifting through my brain. Night alarms like this might be news of violence or misadventure, and sometimes of a nature that required all hands, like a house fire or someone having unexpectedly met with a hunting panther at a spring. More often, though…

I heard Jamie’s voice, and the panic left me. It was low, questioning, with a cadence that meant he was soothing someone. Someone else was talking, in high-pitched agitation, but it wasn’t the sound of disaster.

Me, then. Childbirth or accident? My mind had suddenly resurfaced and was working clearly, even while my body fumbled to and fro, trying to recall what I had done with my grubby stockings. Probably birth, in the middle of the night… But the uneasy thought of fire still lurked on the edge of my thoughts.

Whose that author?

HE WOULD BE REMEMBERED long after his death, one of those rare men recognized as great even by those who hated him. He was a king at twenty-one, wed to a woman as legendary as Helen of Troy, ruler of an empire that stretched from the Scots border to the Mediterranean Sea, King of England, Lord of Ireland and Wales, Duke of Normandy and Aquitaine, Count of Anjou, Touraine, and Maine, liege lord of Brittany. But in God's Year, 1171, Henry Fitz Empress, second of that name to rule England since the Conquest, was more concerned with the judgment of the Church than History's verdict. 

When the Archbishop of Canterbury was slain in his own cathedral by men who believed they were acting on the king's behalf, their bloodied swords might well have dealt Henry a mortal blow, too. All of Christendom was enraged by Thomas Becket's murder and few were willing to heed Henry's impassioned denials of blame. His continental lands were laid under Interdict and his multitude of enemies were emboldened, like wolves on the trail of wounded prey. The beleaguered king chose to make a strategic retreat, and in October, he sailed for Ireland. There he soon established his lordship over the feuding Irish kings and secured oaths of fealty from the Irish bishops. The winter was so stormy that Ireland truly seemed to be at the western edge of the world, the turbulent Irish Sea insulating Henry from the continuing outcry over the archbishop's death. 

But in the spring, the winds abated and contact was established once more with the outside world. Henry learned that papal legates had arrived in Normandy. And he was warned that his restless eldest son was once more chaffing at the bit. In accordance with continental custom, he had been crowned in his father's lifetime. But the young king was dissatisfied with his lot in life, having the trappings of shared kingship but none of the power, and Henry's agents were reporting that Hal was brooding about his plight, listening to the wrong men. Henry Fitz Empress decided it was time to go home. 

Whose that author....obscure clue division

“He stalked into the room, leaned his long rifle against the mantelpiece and spread out his hands to the fire. He was clad from head to foot in fringed and beaded buckskin, which showed evidence of a long and arduous tramp. It was torn and wet and covered with mud. He was a magnificently made man, six feet in height, and stood straight as an arrow. His wide shoulders, and his muscular, though not heavy, limbs denoted wonderful strength and activity. His long hair, black as a raven's wing, hung far down his shoulders. Presently he turned and the light shone on a remarkable face. So calm and cold and stern it was that it seemed chiseled out of marble. The most striking features were its unusual pallor, and the eyes, which were coal black, and piercing as the dagger's point.” 

Whose that Author

“One place like another. 

That was true enough, he thought. Even the merchant seamen were the same. Every ship was the last. One more voyage, just enough pay and bounty saved, and it would be used to buy a little alehouse, a chandlery, a smallholding from some country squire. 

But it never seemed to happen, unless the man was thrown on the beach in peacetime, or rejected as a useless cripple. The sea always won in the end."

Whose that author?

When I got there, Joe Durkin was already holding down a corner table and working on a drink -- vodka on the rocks, from the looks of it. I took in the room and listened to the hum of conversation at the bar, and I guess some of what I was feeling must have found its way to my face, because the first thing Joe asked me was if I was all right. I said I was fine, and why?

"Because you look like you saw a ghost," he said.

"Be funny if I didn't," I said. "The room is full of them."

"A little new for ghosts, isn't it? How long have they been open, two years?"

"Closer to three."

"Time flies," he said, "whether you're having fun or not. Jake's Place, whoever Jake is. You got a history with him?"

"I don't know who he is. I had a history with the place before it was his."

"Jimmy Armstrong's."

"That's right."

Whose that author?

I tried to think how many times I’d kneeled down on asphalt to read the signs, but I knew this was the first time I’d done it in Hulett. Located in the northeast corner of the Wyoming Black Hills, the town is best known for being the home of Devils Tower.

I looked at the macadam blend, the stones shining in the mix that was still wet from the early morning rain, and sighed. With the advent of antilock brakes, it was hard enough to properly estimate the speed of a vehicle involved in a traffic accident, never mind in the rain.

“Do you see anything?”

I nudged my hat farther back on my head and turned to look at the large Indian leaning against the door of Lola, his Baltic blue ’59 Thunderbird and my granddaughter’s namesake. “How about you come over here and take a look for yourself.”

Whose That Author

We're all children. We invent the adult facade and don it and try to keep the buttons and the medals polished. We're all trying to give such a good imitation of being an adult that the real adults in the world won't catch on. Each of us takes up the shticks that compose the adult image we seek. I'd gone the route of lazy, ironic bravado, of amiable, unaffiliated insouciance. Tinhorn knights of a stumbling Rocinante from Rent-A-Steed, maybe with one little area of the heart so pinched, so parched, I never dared let anything really lasting happen to me. Or dared admit the the flaw.
..
The adult you pretend to be convinces himself that the risk is worth the game, the game worth the risk. Tells himself the choice of life style could get him killed — on the Daytona track, in the bull ring, falling from the raw steel framework forty stories up, catching a rodeo hoof in the side of the head.

Adult pretenses are never a perfect fit for the child underneath, and when there is the presentiment of death, like a hard black light making panther eyes glow in the back of the cave, the cry is, "Mommy, mommy, mommy, it's so dark out there, so dark and so forever.

The hostler at the Two Forks Livery & Grain paused in his listless pitching of hay as he saw two riders move down from the crest of the limestone hill. Harley Mills rubbed a sleeve over his sweat-streaked face and speculated as to whether he was fixing to get some customers. Hot as it was, and seeing as the stable didn't belong to him, he had as soon not have business get out of hand. It hadn't lately. With this drought on, people were playing it close to their belts. They weren't coming to town when they didn't have to, because money was tight. He went back to his halfhearted efforts until one of the horses in the corral thrust its head over the top plank and nickered. An answer came from out on the road. Mills put the hayfork aside and stepped through the gate.

The two men were strangers to him. "Mornin'," he said. "From the looks of the dust on you, you've come a ways. I expect them horses could stand a feed."

No one replied. The hostler stared a moment at a rust-bearded man hunched on a streak-faced bay, then his reddish eyes were drawn to the taller rider, a gaunt, sallow-faced man who studied him in dark distrust. The hostler felt a sudden misgiving and wished they had passed him by.

Whose that Author?

[Johnny Torrio] liked my ideas, like setting up a legitimate front to keep the reform crowd from asking embarrassing questions, some easy thing to maintain, like a second-hand furniture store. This was the beginning of Al Brown, Antique Dealer. It wouldn't fool a baby, but it wasn't busting the law in their face, so there wasn't any public show of disrespect, which when you come down to it is the only thing they really care about, the church committees and politicians. Johnny said I had too good a head on my shoulders to make thirty-five bucks a week slugging drunks.
Sometimes, I have to admit, I lost that head. In the fall of 1919 I was drinking in a harbor saloon when this character Artie Finnegan comes in. I didn't know him. Short, squat, face like a cheese. He sees me and starts cussing me out, greasy nigger wop this, greasy nigger wop that, stinking up the place. I'm thinking, what's your problem, Paddy, you got piles or what? Stranger minding his own business, you want to start something over nothing? That's kid stuff. After Five Points I never in my life went looking for a fight. In Chicago I never hit back but that they hit me first. Well, he keeps on, and now he's dragging my family into it, my mother, my father, my wife if I've got one, bastards and whores all of them. He's dotting i's, crossing t's. He didn't come here to lift a pint and sing "Danny Boy."
I beat the Irish clean out of him. My hands still ache when I think about it. They had to drag me off him. Now he's on the floor leaking blood from everywhere, even his ears; I think, well, there you are, you cocksucker, you wanted to dance, now you're dead. I really thought he was.
I wasn't worried about the cops. I'd been pulled in before over a couple of scraps and questioned, roughed around, turned loose with the charges dropped, and when the doctors said they figured they could put Artie Finnegan back together after all, minus a few pieces, I knew the cops wouldn't waste their time looking for an eyewitness that wouldn't say Finnegan slipped on a puddle of beer and fell down a couple dozen times. It was the White Handers I was concerned about. Finnegan was one, and Dinny Meehan didn't like his boys being abused any more than Frankie Yale did his. Dinny sicced Wild Bill Lovett on me.

Whose that author?

HE CALLED the place Pappas and Sons Coffee Shop. His boys were only eight and six when he opened in 1964, but he was thinking that one of them would take over when he got old. Like any father who wasn't a malaka, he wanted his sons to do better than he had done. He wanted them to go to college. But what the hell, you never knew how things would go. One of them might be cut out for college, the other one might not. Or maybe they'd both go to college and decide to take over the business together. Anyway, he hedged his bet and added them to the sign. It let the customers know what kind of man he was. It said, This is a guy who is devoted to his family. John Pappas is thinking about the future of his boys.

The sign was nice: black images against a pearly gray, with "Pappas" twice as big as "and Sons," in big block letters, along with a drawing of a cup of coffee in a saucer, steam rising off its surface. The guy who'd made the sign put a fancy P on the side of the cup, in script, and John liked it so much that he had the real coffee cups for the shop made the same way. Like snappy dressers got their initials sewn on the cuffs of a nice shirt. John Pappas owned no such shirts. He had a couple of blue cotton oxfords for church, but most of his shirts were white button- downs. All were wash- and- wear, to avoid the drycleaning expense. Also, his wife, Calliope, didn't care to iron.

Five short- sleeves for spring and summer and five long- sleeves for fall and winter, hanging in rows on the clothesline he had strung in the basement of their split- level. He didn't know why he bothered with the variety. It was always warm in the store, especially standing over the grill, and even in winter he wore his sleeves rolled up above the elbow. White shirt, khaki pants, black oilskin work shoes from Montgomery Ward. An apron over the pants, a pen holder in the breast pocket of the shirt. His uniform.

Whose that Author?

He was born with a gift of laughter and a sense that the world was mad. And that was all his patrimony. 

His very paternity was obscure, although the village of Gavrillac had long since dispelled the cloud of mystery that hung about it. Those simple Brittany folk were not so simple as to be deceived by a pretended relationship which did not even possess the virtue of originality.

When a nobleman, for no apparent reason, announces himself the godfather of an infant fetched no man knew whence, and thereafter cares for the lad’s rearing and education, the most unsophisticated of country folk perfectly understand the situation. And so the good people of Gavrillac permitted themselves no illusions on the score of the real relationship between Andre-Louis Moreau—as the lad had been named—and Quintin de Kercadiou, Lord of Gavrillac, who dwelt in the big grey house that dominated from its eminence the village clustering below.

From Page to Screen Part One

It is always very interesting when one of your favorite books makes it onto the screen be it TV or movies. You always wonder if it will be portrayed the way you imagine it. Before the extensive use of CGI and computer effects it was never even attempted. Large scale epics were just way too costly. Only big budget movies could even attempt it.

But it is all different now. The Lord of the Rings being the most prominent example along with Jurassic Park. Computer generated CGI lets you have armies of orcs and elves and dwarves. Even a pissant little series like “Once Upon a Time” can really generate great special effects at a much reduced cost. So books that you never thought could be on the screen are suddenly viable. What is interesting is the ones that they choose and the ones that are successful.

The one that most people point to is George Rape Rape Martins “Game of Thrones.” It has become one of the most popular and talked about fantasy series of all time. Most of it is pretty true to the books. The problem for them is the Martin is famously lazy and can’t seem to produce more books for the series to produce for TV. They caught up to him pretty quickly.

Whose that author?

If my dream was true, then everything we know, everything we think we know is a lie. It means the world's about as solid and as reliable as a layer of scum on the top of a well of black water which goes down forever, and there are things in the depths that I don't even want to think about. It means that we're just dolls. We don't have a clue what's really going down, we just kid ourselves that we're in control of our lives while a paper's thickness away things that would drive us mad if we thought about them for too long play with us, and move us around from room to room, and put us away at night when they're tired, or bored.

Whose that author?

It was always a mistake to generalize; but, dear God, security guards were dumb.
Grinnell spotted him two steps inside the door, browsing the Japanese Animation racks in a Hawaiian shirt with the tail out over his sidearm, khaki slacks, and clod-buster black oxfords, the kind whose soles formed a lip all around with white stitching to make the feet that wore them look even bigger. He never stooped even once to look at the videos on the lower shelves, saving his energy to pretend to read the descriptions on the boxes he took off the top. He wore a bar of black moustache as thick as his thumb and his hair looked as if he cut it himself. He might as well have been wearing a uniform.
The layout was identical to all the other stores in the chain, a case man's dream. It had separate doors for entering and exiting, the latter charged with a magnetic field to set off an alarm when a customer tried to sneak Free Willy out unchecked, and a blind room in back where they displayed the porn.

Whose that author?

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.

Whose that Author?

Up to a point a man's life is shaped by environment, heredity, and movements and changes in the world about him; then there comes a time when it lies within his grasp to shape the clay of his life into the sort of thing he wishes to be. Only the weak blame parents, their race, their times, lack of good fortune, or the quirks of fate. Everyone has it within his power to say, this I am today, that I shall be tomorrow. The wish, however, must be implemented by deeds.

Whose that Author?

• In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I've been turning over in my mind ever since. "Whenever you feel like criticizing any one," he told me, "just remember that all the people in this world haven’t had the advantages that you've had." 
• (But what does he know being that he was an alcoholic expatriate who people called great but in reality was one F'ed up dude)