Quote of the Day (Anne Perry, on the Need for ‘The Voice of Dissent’)

“Let us hear the voice of dissent, because the person who asks you why you think what you do and expects you to explain is your best friend. They are clarifying your view, and if you don’t really think what you do, it’s a good time to change. And if you do think what you do, it can make you realize that, well, it’s because of so-and-so. No friend lets you walk over the cliff. They give you the voice of warning.” — British historical mystery novelist and convicted teen murderer Anne Perry (1938-2023), in conversation with Andrew F. Gulli, “Interview: Anne Perry,” The Strand Magazine, Issue 13 (June/September 2004)

Quote of the Day (Dennis Lehane, on Boston Working-Class Humor)

“To this day… I've never met a comedian half as funny as at least five people I knew growing up. In Dorchester … my dad was part of a bar culture. He used to bring me into bars all the time and pretend, telling my mother we were at a farmers’ market so he could sneak in and have a drink on a Saturday. So I grew up listening to people talk and tell stories and they were always working-class stories. The point of any working-class story is ‘I got screwed,’ right? But [also] ‘I got a little bit of vengeance,’ like ‘I keyed his car,’ ‘I slept with his sister.’ It's a tragic story: ‘I got screwed.’ But it's got a little bit of levity in it…. I think in Irish culture, personally—and that's where Dorchester is, and Savin Hill, where I grew up— that's where we get our sense of humor, [from] the Irish. They believe that God is a prankster and we're the butt of the joke, you know.  That's something that just goes into my work.”—American crime novelist and screenwriter Dennis Lehane interviewed by Anna Kusmer for the “Say More” podcast, Boston Globe, Jan.8, 2026 episode

The image accompanying this post, showing Dennis Lehane at the 2010 Brooklyn Book Festival, was taken by David Shankbone.

Quote of the Day (Erle Stanley Gardner, With a Most Un-Perry Mason-Like Character)

“I’m Ed Jenkins, known from end one of the country to the other as ‘the phantom crook,’ and proud of it too. I’m not a second-story bird or a yeggman. I sit tight, watching the game and asking nothing but to let alone. They won’t leave me alone, though. Crooked politicians, ham detectives, cheap crooks, local bosses of the tenderloin, all of ‘em tie into me at times, thinking I can’t raise a how. By the time the smoke blows away, I’m usually sitting somewhere near the top of the heap, a little richer in money, and a little farther removed from any possible police protection. The cops don’t figure they’re hired to protect me. They think it’s up to them to pinch me….Oh, well, it’s all in a lifetime.”—American crime-fiction writer Erle Stanley Gardner (1889-1970), “Three O’Clock in the Morning,” originally published in Black Mask Magazine, July 1925, reprinted in Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine, November/December 2023 

Well, I could have written about Erle Stanley Gardner because today is the 136^th anniversary of his birth (see my blog post from 16 years ago).

But I have been meaning to write about him for a while, because 100 years ago this month, his short story “Three O’Clock in the Morning” was published in the pulp magazine Black Mask.

When I read the reprint of this tale in Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine, I was struck by its low-life lingo, a far cry from the later seasons of the much-loved TV series adaptation of his Perry Mason mysteries. 

The tone was closer to the show in its first few seasons, when Gardner’s great lawyer-detective was ready to pull a stunt so unorthodox that it invariably left prosecutor Hamilton Burger sputtering about “tricks,” and  the extensive location shooting and shadowy night-time scenes suggested a TV counterpart to film noir.

The short story also made me think a bit more about the limited-series reboot of the attorney starring Matthew Rhys that HBO pulled the plug on after only two seasons.

While this more recent version viewed early 20^th-century characters through 21st-century eyes, in ways that often diverged dramatically from how Gardner conceived Perry, devoted secretary Della Street, and private detective Paul Drake, it did capture something fundamental about the era when this amazingly prolific author first began writing.

At this time, Prohibition unwittingly unleashed dark forces in which the lines between "good"  ("the cops") and evil ("Crooked politicians, ham detectives, cheap crooks, local bosses of the tenderloin") became far more tenuous.

Reading this story made me wonder how much of it was based on scruffy types whom Gardner, still maintaining his legal practice at this point, might have met, versus how much “Ed Jenkins” was meant to meet the expectations of the “hard-boiled” crime market that Black Mask helped create by publishing Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, and Cornell Woolrich, among others?

To me, this just goes to show how, over a long career, a writer can evolve, even when trying to fit into the conventions of genre fiction, as Gardner was clearly trying to do.

Quote of the Day (Ian Rankin, on an Artful Jailbreaker)

“Bernie Few’s jailbreaks were a work of art…. As a petty thief he was hopeless, but after capture he started to show his real prowess. He wasn't made for being a housebreaker; but he surely did shine as a jailbreaker. He’d stuff himself into rubbish bags and mail sacks, taken the place of a corpse from one prison hospital, squeezed his wiry frame out of impossibly small windows…and crammed himself into ventilation shafts and heating ducts.”— Scottish crime writer Ian Rankin, “Window of Opportunity,” originally published in Beggars Banquet, republished in Detective Stories, edited by Peter Washington (2009)

In addition to Bernie Few, “Window of Opportunity” also includes Ian Rankin’s longtime hero of the Edinburgh police force, Detective Inspector Rebus. Based on this clever and humorous short story, I am going to make a point to seek out other works by a writer acclaimed as one of the top in the crime genre over the last several decades.

The image of Ian Rankin accompanying this post was taken Aug. 17, 2007, by Tim Duncan.

Quote of the Day (Jerome Charyn, on a Book-Loving Lady Robber)

“[Prudence Miller] wasn't willful about one thing: she never used a partner, male or female. Women were more reliable than men; they wouldn't steal your money and expect you to perform sexual feats with their friends. But women thieves could be just as annoying. She'd had her fill of them at the farm, where they read her diary and borrowed her books. Pru didn't appreciate big fat fingers touching her personal library. Readers were like pilgrims who had to go on their own pilgrimage. Pru was a pilgrim, or at least that's what she imagined. She read from morning to night whenever she wasn't out foraging for hard cash. One of her foster mothers had been a relentless reader, and Prudence had gone right through her shelves, book after book: biographies, Bibles, novels, a book on building terrariums, a history of photography, a history of dance, and Leonard Maltin’s Movie Guide, which she liked the best, because she could read the little encapsulated portraits of films without having to bother about the films themselves. But she lost her library when she broke out of jail, and it bothered her to live without books.”—American novelist-film critic Jerome Charyn, “White Trash,” in Bronx Noir, edited by S. J. Rozan (2007)

The image accompanying this post, of Jerome Charyn at the 2015 Library of Congress National Book Festival, was taken September 6, 2015, by fourandsixty.

Quote of the Day (Laura Lippman, on an Annoying Preppy Mother)

 “In a school renowned for dowdy mothers, Lynette Moore was one of the dowdiest, gone to seed in the way only a truly preppy woman can. She had leathery skin and a Prince Valiant haircut, which she smoothed back with a grosgrain ribbon headband. Her laugh was a loud, annoying bray and if someone failed to join in her merriment, she clapped the person on the back as if trying to dislodge a lump of food. On this particular Thursday afternoon, Lynette stood on the sidewalk, speaking animatedly to one of the teachers, punching the poor woman at intervals. Sally, waiting her turn in the car pool lane, thought how easily a foot could slip, how an accelerator could jam. The SUV would surge forward, Lynette would be pinned against the column by the school’s front door. So sad, but no one’s fault, right?”—Crime fiction writer Laura Lippman, “ARM and the Woman,” in Hardly Knew Her: Stories (2008)

(Photo of Laura Lippman taken at the 2015 Library of Congress National Book Festival, Sept. 6, 2015, by fourandsixty.)

Quote of the Day (James Lee Burke, on Why ‘Vanity in an Artist is Pernicious’)

“William Faulkner, right before his death, said, had I not written the books, another hand would have written them for me. And I think every artist knows that. That’s why vanity in an artist is pernicious and the virtue of humility is not a virtue, it’s a necessity. There is nothing that will kill talent more quickly and with more certainty than pride or self-aggrandizement about one’s gift. This has been my experience. And without exception over the years, as soon as you see an artist, writer, anyone in the arts on television, bragging om his talent, using those horrible words I, me, mine, myself, he’s not at the peak of his career, he’s about ready to go right over the cliff.”—American mystery writer James Lee Burke, quoted in Andrew F. Gulli, “Interview: James Lee Burke,” The Strand Magazine, Issue LXI, 2020

Quote of the Day (Margaret Millar, on Accepting Lies)

“It was better to feed him a lie he would swallow than a truth he would spit out.”—American mystery novelist Margaret Millar (1915-94), The Fiend (1964)

Quote of the Day (Harley Jane Kozak, on an American Adrift in London’s October Fog)

“The October day was murky with fog. And cold. I was wearing Robbie’s red rain slicker, but it wasn’t enough. How’d I get roped into doing this favor-turned-into-an-enigma-wrapped-in-a–Twilight Zone episode? Robbie had a lifetime of practice getting me to do stuff he didn’t like doing—pet immigration in this case—but I’d had the same lifetime of practice saying no. Yet here I was, and minus the pet in question. How had it happened? What had happened? And why? And where was my damned brother? Seriously, what was I supposed to do? Call 911? Was the number even 911 in England? And then what? I wasn’t one to chalk things up to supernatural forces, but it was a stretch to assume a criminal act. What self-respecting thief would want a plump, elderly cat? And why leave in her place this wheezing dog, straining at his makeshift leash, pulling me through London?”—American actress-turned-crime fiction writer Harley Jane Kozak, “The Walk-In,” in The Best American Mystery Stories 2019, edited by Jonathan Lethem (2019)

Appreciations: Agatha Christie Takes Poirot to the West of Ireland

“Hercule Poirot had the feeling, not uncommon in those who come to Inishgowlen for the first time, that he had reached the end of the world. He had never in his life imagined anything so remote, so desolate, so abandoned. It had beauty, a melancholy, haunted beauty, the beauty of a remote and incredible past. Here, in the west of Ireland, the Romans had never marched, tramp, tramp, tramp: had never fortified a camp: had never built a well-ordered, sensible, useful road. It was a land where common sense and an orderly way of life were unknown.

“Hercule Poirot looked down at the tips of his patent-leather shoes and sighed. He felt forlorn and very much alone. The standards by which he lived were here not appreciated.”—English mystery writer Agatha Christie (1890-1976), “The Apples of the Hesperides,” originally printed in The Strand, September 1940, reprinted in Hercule Poirot: The Complete Short Stories (2013)

I have been meaning to write about this passage for a while. As today happens to be what would have been the 130^th birthday of Dame Agatha Christie, what better time than now?

I came across this passage the same way I seem to have with so much other reading matter in these months of COVID-19:  at random, picking up a book lying around my home—in this case, a compilation of more than 50 Christie short stories featuring Hercule Poirot.

I started reading this because it was short enough to finish in one very quick sitting—something increasingly important these days with my attention tugged in so many directions.

Much to my surprise, more than halfway through the tale, I came upon the above passage. I was immediately hooked—a feeling that would surely have delighted Dame Agatha, but for a reason she might not have expected.

As near as I can tell, there is no place called “Inishgowlen” in Ireland. There are some that sound close: Inishgowla, in County Mayo; Inishowen. in County Donegal; and the island Inishfallen in the three Lakes of Killarney in County Kerry.

But the scene that the Queen of Crime describes is in the West of Ireland. To be more exact, with its description of that craggy cliff, this sounds like the Cliffs of Moher, not far from where my dad lived for his first three decades in County Clare, Ireland.

To say I was astounded by this is putting it mildly. I was used to Christie’s spinster sleuth Miss Marple solving mysteries in her village of St. Mary Mead. I even know that Poirot had identified murderers on the Nile and on the Orient Express. But the west coast of Ireland? It might as well have been the far side of the moon, as far as I was concerned.

“The Apples of the Hesperides” is not the only Poirot short story in which Ireland figures. In “The Kidnapped Prime Minister,” the driver of the title character hails from County Clare and, as if to ensure that English readers know he’s Irish, is named O’Murphy.

(An event from the Irish War of Independence may have led Christie to include this plot point: Field Marshal Sir Henry Wilson, an Irish Unionist politician, had been assassinated, rumor had it, on orders from Irish Free State Commander in Chief Michael Collins, a year before the story was published.)

I groaned when I read Christie’s description of this area as disorderly and backward. It could only appeal to a certain faction of the British public that had long regarded their onetime colony with loathing and distrust even as they hold so firmly onto it.

My feelings were not immediately assuaged when I read Christie’s depiction of a Poirot encounter with a nun in an Inishgowlen convent. As she greets the detective, she is as intimidating a figure as “The Penguin,” the orphanage nun who continues to beat John Belushi and Dan Aykroyd in The Blues Brothers.

But the story overturns expectations in its conclusion. Poirot might be put out by the denial of his creature comforts in this region of Ireland, but as a practicing Catholic he shares the essential worldview of the nun in the convent: that man is a sinful creature who must atone for this fallen world.  The detective would get one of the biggest sinners of all to commit an action that, though isolated, remains one of epic self-denial for a criminal.

Christie’s family relationships may have informed her attitude of respectful, if remote, curiosity about both Ireland and Catholicism. Her mother was of Irish and German descent. While the writer herself was not Catholic, her second husband, the archaeologist Max Mallowan, was.

Even after “The Apples of the Hesperides,” Christie was not done with Ireland. In the 1950s, she, like Miss Marple in the novel Nemesis, toured the Great Gardens of Ireland.

Though she devoted only meager space to Ireland, her fans in the Emerald Isle still embrace her fiction. Irish academic John Curran plumbed 73 of her notebooks for insights into her work. A couple of years ago, the stunning Grey Abbey House in Northern Ireland was used as a location for the Christmas whodunnit Agatha and the Truth of Murder, featuring Christie as the tale’s detective.

(The image accompanying this post shows David Suchet as Hercule Poirot, in the PBS series about the Belgian detective exercising his "little gray cells.")

This Day in Literary History (P.D. James, Who Went From Trauma Survivor to Bestselling ‘Queen of Crime,’ Born)

Aug. 3, 1920—P.D. James, who was thrust into the workforce as a result of trauma, then became known as “The Queen of Crime” through mysteries that dealt with the violent aftermath of such crises, was born in Oxford, England.

Many fans of Phyllis Dorothy James (as she was christened) would be astounded to know that this creator of graceful prose—not to mention of a hero-detective who writes poetry, Adam Dalgleish—was entirely self-taught. Despite her birth in Oxford and residence in Cambridge later in childhood, she never graduated from a university, as her impecunious father saw little value in girls going on for higher education.

The most powerful impetus for her career, in fact, was not education, but her need to provide for her family because of the mental illness afflicting those closest to her.

When a full-scale biography finally tells the story of “Baroness James of Holland Park” (her title when she was created a life peer in 1991), her longtime readers will surely want to know how she shouldered and survived two traumas in relatively quick succession—first, her mother’s placement in a mental hospital in Phyllis’ mid-teens (forcing her to care for two younger sisters), and, in her late twenties, her husband’s mental illness (requiring that she become the sole breadwinner for her two young daughters).

In the case of the latter incident, she married medical student Ernest Connor Bantry White in 1941. While serving as a doctor in WWII, White suffered a mental breakdown, but his condition was not deemed war-related, so he received no disability pension. Now needing to provide for him and their daughters, James began to work for the U.K.’s Hospital Service in 1949.

 

Fifteen years later, White died. Over the years, James was reticent about his death. But, in a 2010 interview with Nigel Farndale of the U.K. newspaper The Daily Telegraph, she admitted that his demise in 1964 was related to his mental illness and that she had discovered his body.

By this time, James was already six years into writing detective fiction, but—much like T.S. Eliot and Wallace Stevens before her—she pursued writing after her day job had ended. In 1968, she began serving in the Home Office—first in the Police Department, then as a senior civil servant in the Criminal Policy Department, focusing on juvenile crime.

James’ combined three decades in the workforce not only inspired particular elements of her plot (e.g., watching a patient being fed through a tube led her to use this as a murder method in Shroud for a Nightingale) but enabled her to gain knowledge of organizational environments, especially how individuals reacted in these settings.

Consequently, James remembered later, settings became the starting point of her imaginative process. They were varied, and sometimes quite unusual: a private nursing home, a nuclear power station, a Church of England theological college, even an island fortress where a Jacobean tragedy would be performed.

Growing critical acclaim and book sales—as well as revenues from TV adaptations of her works—enabled James to leave the civil service in 1979 and concentrate on writing full-time. In the remaining years before her death in 2014, James became more prolific and more ambitious, moving away from detective tales into more general psychological suspense (Innocent Blood) and even dystopian fiction (Children of Men). 

Although Scotland Yard policeman Commander Adam Dalgliesh represented her most consistent and frequent source of remuneration (14 books over 44 years), I suspect that James may have invested most of herself psychologically in a different detective: Cordelia Gray. 

In An Unsuitable Job for a Woman (1972), Gray, like her creator, finds herself thrust by a tragedy involving a male partner into a position far outside her comfort zone: in this case, as sole owner of a private detective agency. Moreover, like James, Gray triumphs over doubting males through hard work, piercing intelligence, and undaunted courage.

The concern with individual psychology that is the wellspring of James’ fiction inevitably widens to wider consideration of how the social fabric is torn by those who suffer early on. In her late-life Time to Be in Earnest: A Fragment of Autobiography, James concluded: 

“What a child doesn't receive he can seldom later give….Children live in occupied territory. The brave and the foolhardy openly rebel against authority, whether harsh or benign. But most tread warily, outwardly accommodating themselves to alien mores and edicts while living in secret their iconoclastic and subversive lives.”

A crime, James told NPR’s Linda Wertheimer in a 2009 interview, is solved “not by good luck or divine intervention. It's solved by a human being. By human courage and human intelligence and human perseverance. In a sense, the detective story is a small celebration of reason and order in our very disorderly world."

In the interwar “Golden Age” of detective fiction, four female predecessors had combined to "[lift] a rather despised genre into a form which could be taken seriously," James once explained: Agatha Christie, Ngaio Marsh, Margery Allingham and Dorothy L. Sayers. The latter two especially influenced her by setting her standards for style and characterization.

Perhaps even more than Allingham and Sayers, though, James demonstrated that she was not just a superb genre writer but a superb writer, period—one unafraid to pick up her life after crushing tragedy, and to depict how society, in the form of detectives, reassert the social order sundered by personal traumas.

(Thanks to my friend Holly for alerting me to James' quote about children.)

This Day in Literary History (Charles Dickens, ‘Generously Angry’ Champion of the Underdog, Dies)

June 9, 1870—Charles Dickens, whose prolific career included forerunners of the modern crime novel, left a few mysteries of his own when he died at age 58 of a stroke at his country home Gad’s Hill Place, in Rochester, England, including:

*How did he intend to finish the novel on which he was working at the time of his death, The Mystery of Edwin Drood?

*Was he at home at the time of his fatal stroke?

*Why were his wishes for a simple burial disregarded?

The following is what we know—or don’t—about these questions:

*Drood: Unlike F. Scott Fitzgerald’s unfinished The Last Tycoon, Dickens left no notes for how his book might turn out. We only know, based on the number of installments, that he had reached the halfway mark of the novel. Writing in installments for magazine publishing helped him to adjust plots and characterizations by gauging ongoing reader reaction, but it also deprived us of knowing his final destination for what turned out to be his last book.

*Dickens’ whereabouts on the day before his death: In her judicious 2011 biography, Charles Dickens, Claire Tomalin reviewed the recollections of his beloved daughter, sister-in-law, and a local doctor called to Gad’s Hill. His careful concealment of involvement with his much younger mistress, Ellen (Nelly) Ternan, led Tomalin to offer an alternative scenario for the day of his stroke, one that she admitted was “a wild and improbable story, but not an entirely impossible one”—i.e., that, instead of suffering his stroke at home, Dickens collapsed at the home of Nelly, who—to preserve her lover’s reputation and her own—got him, with some help, into a hackney cab, where he was conveyed back to his own home.

*Burial: Dickens’ will specified that he wished to be “buried in an inexpensive, unostentatious, and strictly private manner; that no public announcement be made of the time or place of my burial; that at the utmost not more than three plain mourning coaches be employed; and that those who attend my funeral wear no scarf, cloak, black bow, long hat-band, or other such revolting absurdity.” That is hardly what occurred. In the end, his remains were brought to the Valhalla of English literati: Poet’s Corner in Westminster Abbey. In a very revealing article this past February in Smithsonian Magazine, Leon Litvack disclosed that this circumvention of Dickens’ wishes was engineered by his friend and eventual biographer, John Forster, and the dean of Westminster, Arthur Penrhyn Stanley, both of whom stood to gain by creating an unstoppable groundswell of public opinion on behalf of this move.

(Incidentally, the involvement of Nelly Ternan in this closing chapter of Dickens’ story remains as murky as much else: At the final services, Dickens’ estranged wife Catherine was excluded; accounts of those present note that 14 mourners were in attendance. Many, but not all, were specifically named. It is possible that Nelly was the unnamed attendee.)

It is natural that Dickens, a spellbinding storyteller given to astonishing plot twists, left a few in his own life. But I could not write this post without considering his larger legacy.

Dickens pioneered so much in the writing and marketing of modern fiction, but his influence on the crime novel receives less attention than it should. From Oliver Twist to The Mystery of Edwin Drood, he continually turned his attention to its significant presence in Victorian England. 

Just as masters of the genre have discovered in the past century, such subjects offers unique and abundant opportunities to consider both twisted individual psychology and larger social pathologies. In other words, the forces of injustice create the preconditions for crime, its exploiters and victims.

In contemporary America, where the police are increasingly regarded as abusers of power, it may come as a shock that Dickens sees the London police force as a bulwark of the moral order. The Dickens novel I was assigned in a college Victorian Literature course, Bleak House, even creates one of the first detectives in fiction: Inspector Bucket.  

A post from the Web site “Read Great Literature” offers the presence of this character as a reason to love this novel, noting his resemblance to my favorite TV sleuth, Peter Falk’s Lieutenant Columbo: his humble nature, his dogged pursuit of clues, and even a beloved wife!

Above all, Dickens recognized that crime, like injustice, left untold victims in its wake, and it needed to be countered not just with the highly rational faculties of Edgar Allan Poe’s Auguste Dupin or Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes, but with a fearless commitment to truth and a stout heart. That type of person would be a champion of the underdog like Dickens himself, as summarized by George Orwell:

“In the case of Dickens I see a face that is not quite the face of Dickens's photographs, though it resembles it. It is the face of a man of about forty, with a small beard and a high colour. He is laughing, with a touch of anger in his laughter, but no triumph, no malignity. It is the face of a man who is always fighting against something, but who fights in the open and is not frightened, the face of a man who is generously angry — in other words, of a nineteenth-century liberal, a free intelligence, a type hated with equal hatred by all the smelly little orthodoxies which are now contending for our souls.”

Quote of the Day (Laura Lippman, on a Dieting, First-Time Drug Buyer)

“Molly thought hard, and Molly thinking was like a fat guy running --- there was a lot of visible effort.”— Baltimore-based crime fiction writer Laura Lippman, “The Crack Cocaine Diet,” in Hardly Knew Her: Short Stories (2008)

(Photo of Laura Lippman taken at the 2015 Library of Congress National Book Festival, Sept. 6, 2015, by fourandsixty.)

Quote of the Day (Robin Yocum, Channeling an Aging Hitman)

“Before he died, [Little Tommy Fortunato’s] dad, Tommoso ‘Big Tommy’ Fortunato, asked me to look after his only son. I promised I would. It’s been six years since the old man stroked out, and I’m an afterthought in the family these days. I don’t get invited to dinner. No one asks how I’m doing. I thought I’d be a mentor to Little Tommy, but that’s not how he wants it. When I think of it, the only reason he hasn’t already shoved me out the door is I know all the family secrets. I know where the bodies are buried—literally.”—Robin Yocum, “The Last Hit,” Strand Magazine, July-Nov. 2019

Oh, the troubles of the family business! And when I say “the family,” I mean “THE FAMILY,” as in the Corleones, the Sopranos, and their ilk. It’s the brilliance of Yokum’s article in the current issue of Strand Magazine that he teases out one of the most intriguing but least remarked-upon side of the underworld as a business—i.e., what happens when the next generation comes along, cocky and without reverence for either the rules or the loyal employees who, over the years, built the enterprise to what it is today.

Not many people know anything about the line of work of this story’s narrator, Angelo (“my specialty is elimination”), but many will find more universal what sticks in his craw: “After five decades of undying loyalty to the family, Little Tommy treats me like a leper.” It doesn’t help that Little Tommy is as ruthless as Michael Corleone and as brainless as brother Fredo.
 

Readers will be even more sympathetic as Angelo puzzles over how to deal with this successor’s favorite, Gaetano, who combines indiscretion with disrespect—both capital offenses to the old school Angelo.

I bought this issue of Strand for a piece that won the magazine unusually widespread coverage: the first publication in English of a 1954 story John Steinbeck wrote in Paris. But “The Last Hit” turned out to be an unexpected and major reading pleasure for me. It makes me want to track down more of the work of Mr. Yocum.