Doesn't Mean Dick
watching the detectives
I'll preface this article simply: I like detective stories.
Not mysteries, mind you. I don't necessarily enjoy novels with mysterious deaths and subtle clues and a gentleman investigator puzzling out the affair of Mrs. Montalt's tea chest.
I like stories where the narrator and/or protagonist gets hit in the head a lot, drinks heavily and refers to women as dames, broads and molls. Of course it follows that I like Dashiell Hammett and absolutely dote on Raymond Chandler.
Ideally, there'd be some rating system on the back covers of detective novels with little glyphs of whiskey bottles, saps and hard-boiled eggs, more depending on how much the various aspects appeared in the novel. In the real world, I tend to hit and miss.
One of my hits came right before my family left for Canada last school vacation. I checked out two books from the library for the journey, volumes I and II of a collection of crime novels. I'd always wanted to read The Killer Inside Meafter hearing it mentioned by the Dead Milkmen, and The Incredible Mr. Ripley after hearing it was all about an effeminate sociopath. Those were fine novels, and the other novels in the collections were pretty darn good as well, The Postman Always Rings Twice and They Shoot Horses, Don't They? among the more famous titles.
As I tend to do, I returned to that shelf in the library to see if I could find more crime novels. Alas, that genre seems to have been invented by that publisher, for I found nothing else either hardboiled or deranged.
I did, however, find a nice book of locked room mysteries, which are generally entertaining, if not too concerned about dressing the logic puzzle in description. They served to fill an evening with enjoyment, especially when I turned to "Murder at the Automat," a 1937 story by Cornell Woolrich. Someone had been there before me, and he wasn't all that bright.
I make notes in the margins of books I own or buy for classes, to help me study for tests, remember references or to keep myself from going crazy at typos. I never write in library books, and this is one of the reasons why:
In installment one, the reader is confused by the word "dick." Could the author be referring to the detectives' penises as shorthand for the whole? Such a visionary prefeminist!
Or perhaps the author is just calling them pricks.
Jerk? Cock? Illegible in original? God forbid he should check a dictionary!
He takes his rage at having a small vocabulary out on the text. "Sue the cops, wrongly-accused 1937 man," is his futile cry, left for the next reader's edification.
Still baffled by dick, he continues his new coping strategy. There are several more circlings and underlinings of dick after this that I haven't scanned.
Another bit of old slang, this time a phrase, confuses our reader. I hadn't heard this before, either, but it didn't slow my reading because it is totally self-explanatory and also supported by the context. Oddly enough, our reader didn't have any trouble with the whole concept of automats. Do they still have automats somewhere, somewhere with many, many legal books but no detective fiction?
Oh no, another Earth custom frightens our reader. I guess he has NEVER EVER SEEN A TELEGRAM IN A BOOK OR EVEN A GODDAMN MOVIE. There were more marginal notes that my poor scanning cut off, all possible meanings of these mysterious stops.
It must have been hard, growing up in that automat.
The stops spur our hero into an articulate, almost whining plea for comprehension.
"Why is he a dick? OH GOD, WHY? IF ONLY THERE WERE SOME BOOK FULL OF DEFINITIONS, INCLUDING ARCHAIC ONES, OF COMMON WORDS, MY QUESTION COULD BE ANSWERED!!1!"
This is not the last page by any means, but it's the last annotation. I believe at this point the reader either gave up his self-imposed footnotes, quit reading the book, or burst something vital in his brain.
Judging by the lack of appropriate stains in the book, I don't have much hope for the last option.
Image stolen from Carol Lay
Also this update: stragglers from Ukulele Week.
I played these two songs on the ukulele I ordered for my father, just to test if it played okay. (It did.) I had a bad weekend, so they're both from the sappy end of David Byrne's song catalog.
I Know Sometimes a Man Is Wrong (1.24 MB)
A Long Time Ago (1.73 MB)
And then I thought my ukulele might get jealous, so I dragged it out and played Kraftwerk's The Model (769 KB). You will notice I played the song in almost a tenth of the time it takes those so-called Germans! Ha!
Not mysteries, mind you. I don't necessarily enjoy novels with mysterious deaths and subtle clues and a gentleman investigator puzzling out the affair of Mrs. Montalt's tea chest.
I like stories where the narrator and/or protagonist gets hit in the head a lot, drinks heavily and refers to women as dames, broads and molls. Of course it follows that I like Dashiell Hammett and absolutely dote on Raymond Chandler.
Ideally, there'd be some rating system on the back covers of detective novels with little glyphs of whiskey bottles, saps and hard-boiled eggs, more depending on how much the various aspects appeared in the novel. In the real world, I tend to hit and miss.
One of my hits came right before my family left for Canada last school vacation. I checked out two books from the library for the journey, volumes I and II of a collection of crime novels. I'd always wanted to read The Killer Inside Me
As I tend to do, I returned to that shelf in the library to see if I could find more crime novels. Alas, that genre seems to have been invented by that publisher, for I found nothing else either hardboiled or deranged.
I did, however, find a nice book of locked room mysteries, which are generally entertaining, if not too concerned about dressing the logic puzzle in description. They served to fill an evening with enjoyment, especially when I turned to "Murder at the Automat," a 1937 story by Cornell Woolrich. Someone had been there before me, and he wasn't all that bright.
I make notes in the margins of books I own or buy for classes, to help me study for tests, remember references or to keep myself from going crazy at typos. I never write in library books, and this is one of the reasons why:
In installment one, the reader is confused by the word "dick." Could the author be referring to the detectives' penises as shorthand for the whole? Such a visionary prefeminist!
Or perhaps the author is just calling them pricks.
Jerk? Cock? Illegible in original? God forbid he should check a dictionary!
He takes his rage at having a small vocabulary out on the text. "Sue the cops, wrongly-accused 1937 man," is his futile cry, left for the next reader's edification.
Still baffled by dick, he continues his new coping strategy. There are several more circlings and underlinings of dick after this that I haven't scanned.
Another bit of old slang, this time a phrase, confuses our reader. I hadn't heard this before, either, but it didn't slow my reading because it is totally self-explanatory and also supported by the context. Oddly enough, our reader didn't have any trouble with the whole concept of automats. Do they still have automats somewhere, somewhere with many, many legal books but no detective fiction?
Oh no, another Earth custom frightens our reader. I guess he has NEVER EVER SEEN A TELEGRAM IN A BOOK OR EVEN A GODDAMN MOVIE. There were more marginal notes that my poor scanning cut off, all possible meanings of these mysterious stops.
It must have been hard, growing up in that automat.
The stops spur our hero into an articulate, almost whining plea for comprehension.
"Why is he a dick? OH GOD, WHY? IF ONLY THERE WERE SOME BOOK FULL OF DEFINITIONS, INCLUDING ARCHAIC ONES, OF COMMON WORDS, MY QUESTION COULD BE ANSWERED!!1!"
This is not the last page by any means, but it's the last annotation. I believe at this point the reader either gave up his self-imposed footnotes, quit reading the book, or burst something vital in his brain.
Judging by the lack of appropriate stains in the book, I don't have much hope for the last option.
Image stolen from Carol Lay
Also this update: stragglers from Ukulele Week.
I played these two songs on the ukulele I ordered for my father, just to test if it played okay. (It did.) I had a bad weekend, so they're both from the sappy end of David Byrne's song catalog.
I Know Sometimes a Man Is Wrong (1.24 MB)
A Long Time Ago (1.73 MB)
And then I thought my ukulele might get jealous, so I dragged it out and played Kraftwerk's The Model (769 KB). You will notice I played the song in almost a tenth of the time it takes those so-called Germans! Ha!