Paul Madvig arrived early in the afternoon. “Christ, I’m glad to see you alive again!” he said. He took the invalid’s unbandaged left hand in both of his.
Ned Beaumont said: “I’m all right. But here’s what we’ve got to do: grab Walt Ivans and have him taken over to Braywood and shown to the gun-dealers there. He—”
“You told me all that,” Madvig said. “That’s done.”
Ned Beaumont frowned. “I told you?”
“Sure—the morning you were picked up. They took you to the Emergency Hospital and you wouldn’t let them do anything to you till you’d seen me and I came down there and you told me about Ivans and Braywood and passed out cold.”
“It’s a blank to me,” Ned Beaumont said. “Did you nail them?”
“We got the Ivanses, all right, and Walt Ivans talked after he was identified in Braywood and the Grand Jury indicted Jeff Gardner and two John Does, but we’re not going to be able to nail Shad on it. Gardner’s the man Ivans dickered with and anybody knows he wouldn’t do anything without Shad’s say-so, but proving it’s another thing.”
“Jeff’s the monkey-looking guy, huh? Has he been picked up yet?”
“No. Shad took him into hiding with him after you got away, I guess. They had you, didn’t they?”
“Uh-huh. In the Dog House, upstairs. I went there to lay a trap for the gent and he out-trapped me.” He scowled. “I remember going there with Whisky Vassos and being bitten by the dog and knocked around by Jeff and a blond kid. Then there was something about a fire and—that’s about all. Who found me? and where?”
“A copper found you crawling on all fours up the middle of Colman Street at three in the morning leaving a trail of blood behind you.”
“I think of funny things to do,” Ned Beaumont said.
You can’t tell a completely new story. That’s a fact. Nobody can do anything about it, nobody should try. Total originality is a chimera; maybe not even something one should aspire to–wouldn’t something completely unprecedented be at the same time untested, unreliable–even incomprehensible? How would we even know if it was any good or not? Art is a process, hopefully a progression–like life. You build on what came before, absorbing influences, and sometimes improving on them. Evolution is a thing, and we should respect it, since it’s how we all got here.
All that being said, there’s some consensus that this particular story, structured this particular way, within this particular genre, is a relatively original confabulation of Dashiell Hammett’s. If anybody told it before, in some form or other, it didn’t take, and nobody remembers it. You could probably find some version of it in Shakespeare, like you can everything else, but Shakespeare didn’t write crime fiction, he wrote fiction with crimes in it. There’s a difference.
Perhaps something of a certain wily Spanish barber here? Ostensibly the servant of a count, but with his own ingenious agenda, wheels within wheels, and he gets the girl. Maybe, but Senor Figaro had his predecessors as well, and none of them are the stuff hardboiled heroes are made of.
Let’s run through the particulars, shall we? There’s this guy. Tough. Resourceful. Smart. Attractive to the ladies. Snappy dresser. Coolly competent, with a cutting sarcastic wit. A cagey operator, a fixer, a consigliere, working for some kind of criminal outfit. This outfit isn’t necessarily a gang. But connected. Fingers in a lot of pies. Playing a dominating role in whatever burg it’s situated in (usually a fictional one). In short, a machine.
But that machine has a lot of moving parts, depends on a whole lot of things running just so. There’s the law to worry about (though it’s usually on the take), and there’s rival outfits looking to cut themselves in. There’s the human factor to contend with. Machines with lots of moving parts are prone to breaking down.
Hence the need for a fixer, and he’ll be our protagonist, our window into this world. But he’s not the boss. He works for the boss. The boss’ good right hand. A valued asset. He and the boss are just like that. Maybe
It’s the maybe part the story tends to hinge on. That’s where the variables tend to stem from. Where do the fixer’s ultimate loyalties lie? How much can he rely on the boss? How much can the boss rely on him? How much do they trust each other when the chips are down? Why is such a multi-talented individual content to be a mere flunky? Is he, in fact, content to be that? There’s dames in the mix, because that goes with the territory, and they just complicate things further, but nobody’s complaining much.
Hammett had written about a town with just such a machine before, in Red Harvest. The Continental Op comes to a corrupt midwestern mining town, where rival factions are at each others’ throats, and even though it’s none of his beeswax, in the process of doing his job, he plays them against each other, and restores a sort of balance, strictly off the books.
But his loyalties are never in question, because he’s talking to us in the first person, and we know what he’s up to, who he works for. He brings us into his confidence. He’s an employee, a private cop, on the side of the law, even if he bends it a lot. A detective.
The hero of The Glass Key is, technically, a detective for most of the narrative, sworn in as an investigator for the D.A’s office, trying to solve a murder (which turns into several). But that’s just a disguise he puts on, to help his friend, the power behind the throne, who has city hall (and the D.A.’s office) in his pocket. If he finds out his boss is the murderer, he’ll still help him beat the rap.
Hammett had written about criminals his whole career, often from direct experience with them, as a Pinkerton operative. His detectives were on the shady side of the law, often leaning towards illegality, but still lawmen, when the chips were down. Not this new guy. If Sam Spade is ambiguously straight (you know what I meant), Ned Beaumont is just as ambiguously crooked. They’re working different sides of the same mean street.
It’s hard to say just how crooked, because Ned Beaumont (at all times referred to as such by the very formal narrator) isn’t going to share with us. He’s not going to tell us what’s going on inside his head. The Continental Op stories are the Op telling us his stories, but Hammett had moved into the third person with The Maltese Falcon, and found it suited him (he’d dabbled in earlier shorts, but not his best ones). He went back to first person with The Thin Man, but weirdly it still felt like third person, the ambiguity and emotional distance remaining (Westlake admired this very neat trick, but we can talk about that some other time).
Hammett doesn’t use the greater freedom of this more objective format to switch up perspectives, though. He’s still sticking with his man, be it Spade or Beaumont, letting us see the world entirely through their sharp cynical eyes, but not letting us inside their sharp cynical minds, as he did with the Op. Keeping us guessing. Who is this guy? What’s he up to? What does he want? Does he even know? That’s the real mystery. The rest is McGuffins.
Hammett’s novels came out one after the other from the late 20’s through the middle 30’s, usually first in serial form in Black Mask, then in hardcover (no paperbacks yet). Between 1927, when the early version of Red Harvest started its run, to 1934, when The Thin Man came out in book form.
Five novels. Two with The Op, then three successive protagonists, each of whom had other stories afterwards, but Hammett never could come up with a convincing second act for any of them. The Op stories greatly outnumber all the others combined, but that was partly because Hammett stopped writing–at least he stopped writing stuff he believed in enough to publish in book form, which to him was all that really counted. Movies, radio–nice source of drinking money. It wasn’t real.
Hammett was hitting a wall. Everybody’s got an opinion about what that wall was composed of, how it got built. Lillian Hellman said she never figured it out, and who’d know better than her? Hammett was the ultimate Hammett protagonist. Nobody knew what he wanted. Maybe not even him. But with just five books, written in less than a decade, he changed the face of mystery forever. The genre has produced a few better writers (Westlake was one of them), but he was its supreme innovator. Perhaps the greatest genre writer of all time. Better than most of the non-genre people as well.
But for all that, Mr. Hammett and I have a little disagreement. He said The Glass Key was the best of his five published novels. I’ve read all five now, and I say it’s his worst. Still pretty damn great. Full of inspired passages, like the one above. Asking some very good questions, laying some very crucial groundwork. But the answers aren’t entirely satisfying, the paving stones don’t fit together just right.
For one thing, it’s supposed to be a murder mystery, and the mystery itself is on the weak side. For another, Ned Beaumont is by far the least convincing of Hammett’s four major protagonists, because he’s got motivation problems. That all his later fictional progeny inherited, to some degree. For all his talents, he’s a study in failure. A loser by choice. Maybe that’s what Hammett liked about him.
Hammett found a problem well worth solving–a new way of telling a detective story, a new perspective for writing about the criminal underworld, and its many links to the world us solid citizens live in–and he couldn’t balance out the equation. But he saw the potential there, even if he couldn’t quite realize it. Hoping, perhaps, that he could figure it out later. Later never came. The Glass Key turned out to be a promise never fulfilled. At least not by Hammett himself.
In fiction, as in math, unsolved problems are often the most intriguing ones, and each new generation will test itself against them. Many have taken a whack at rebalancing Hammett’s figures. We’ll be talking about that. Let’s check his calculations first.
214 pages in the first edition hardcover. 10 chapters. Each chapter is long, and split into roman-numeraled sections–Chapter 1 gets IX of them.
Ned Beaumont is introduced to us as an habitual gambler who loses a lot at the craps tables, and never once worries about it. He’s not gambling to get rich, but because he likes it. On his way to get more good money to throw after bad, he runs into a guy he knows named Walter Ivans. He greets him by saying ‘Lo Walt. He greets everybody this way. The ‘Lo part. Can’t be bothered with a two syllable greeting. Not big on formalities, is Ned Beaumont.
Ivans stutters–he’s nervous, but seems like the impediment isn’t just nerves. (Also seems like this rings a bell with me, with regards to a very early Westlake novel based quite directly on this one. Mr. Westlake found subtle ways to namecheck his influences.)
Ivans’ brother is up for a prison rap–he and Walt are both connected to the same outfit as Ned. He wants the boss of their outfit, Paul Madvig to make that rap go away. Ned, visibly discomfited, says he will, but not until November–after the next election. Walt’s not satisfied. Ned says he’ll talk to Paul about it, but Walt shouldn’t expect anything.
He goes upstairs to the boss’s office–yeah, same house as the gambling parlor. Not much need to keep up appearances of legality in this sewn-up town. He asks Paul for a couple hundred to tide him over (around three grand today). Madvig, a tall powerful-looking blonde in a suit, maybe forty-five years of age, is not merely the big wheel, but the only wheel in town–everybody else is just a cog in his machine. Never ran for office in his life, and all the politicians are under his well-manicured thumb. He’s also Ned’s best friend in the world–maybe his only friend. Ned’s not really the Dale Carnegie type, as we’ll see.
Paul coughs up the two hundred like it’s carfare. But he expresses concern at Ned’s recent run of luck. He hasn’t won in over a month. “That’s a long time to be losing.” “Not for me” Ned Beaumont responds, bothered by the concern. Prickly, even with his pals.
Ned picks up the phone and calls a bookie. Hedges a bet on Peggy O’Toole–500 to win, 500 to place, 500 to show. He’s mad at himself about that. Says he should have put the whole fifteen on her nose. Only it might not rain. Peggy runs better in the rain. We’re inferring Peggy is a horse. I had a dog named Peggy. Ran like blazes, wet or dry. Hey, if you’re bored, you can leave. Ned’s not the only one who gets prickly around here.
They spar a bit, these two. There’s always some beef between them. They can never be fully at ease together, because they’re not wired that way. Ned works for Paul, hits him up for money often, but he’s not the type to knuckle under, to anybody, ever. Paul respects that, and he needs Ned–his brains, his guts, his instincts. But the sparring never ends. Here’s a sample round in the running bout–
Ned Beaumont grinned crookedly at the blond man and made his voice drawl. “We didn’t have to do much worrying about women’s clubs before we joined the aristocracy.”
“We do now.” Madvig’s eyes were opaque.
“Tim’s wife’s going to have a baby next month,” Ned Beaumont said.
Madvig blew breath out in an impatient gust. “Anything to make it tougher,” he complained. “Why don’t they think of those things before they get in trouble? They’ve got no brains, none of them.”
“They’ve got votes.”
“That’s the hell of it,” Madvig growled. He glowered at the floor for a moment, then raised his head. “We’ll take care of him as soon as the votes are counted, but nothing doing till then.”
Paul’s working on a move that could make him respectable, get him out of the rackets for keeps, married to Janet Henry, beautiful young society girl, the daughter of a senator who needs Paul’s support for reelection. Paul talks up the political advantages for their organization in this strategic alliance. Ned figures the alliance is more amorous than strategic–Paul’s in love, maybe more with the idea of Janet than Janet herself. But either way, it’s amour fou, and Paul can’t be argued out of it.
And if this all panned out, if he ascended to a higher level, what would Paul need his faithful fixer for? Ned’s skeptical Paul’s plan will ever pan out–old money always looks down on new, and Janet has shown no interest in Paul. But still, the question remains implicit–if Paul marries up, does he leave Ned down below to run the stuff he can’t touch anymore? Right now, it’s moot. They’re still in the trenches, fighting rival machines, political and criminal in nature. Paul can’t get by without his good right arm.
The arm, for his part, would take six bullets for Paul without a whimper. But the tension is always there, regardless. Alpha males. Two men who look at the world in deeply incompatible ways, and like each other all the more for that. Their acquaintance can’t be longstanding–we’re told Ned got to this hick burg from New York a year or two back. We don’t know how they met, how they got so close, how Ned became family–Paul’s mother keeps asking when Ned’s coming to dinner. The two must have clicked almost on sight.
We never learn how this friendship got started. But Hammett can get it all across to us in a few brush strokes. He takes it for granted we all know what it’s like, the loyalty of friendship. How much it means, in a cold and inconstant world. How much you’ll put yourself through for it. And all the more if you’re one of those people who have a hard time finding it.
The friendship between Beaumont and Madvig is a mystery in itself. And is there any greater mystery than friendship? How it gets born. And how, sometimes, it dies. The first mystery isn’t dealt with here, but we’re going to get an answer on the second. Spoiler alert.
A lot happens in Chapter 1. After Paul tells Ned to keep the foot soldiers happy by footing all the bills for the jailed man’s wife, Ned goes out and at some point finds a dead body on the street. He doesn’t call the cops right away. You get the feeling this kind of thing happens to him all the time, but this is a different order of stiff.
It’s Taylor Henry, son of Senator Henry, brother of Janet. A bit of a rake. Who has been sniffing around Paul’s charming young daughter, perhaps by a prior marriage, but that’s another thing we never hear much about. Paul has made it clear there’s to be no romantic quid pro quo in this case, but that just made Taylor more attractive to her, and she to him. Forbidden fruit.
So before calling the law, Ned goes back to straighten out a few things with Paul. Like, did he do it? Paul’s not telling either way. He doesn’t sound real broken up about it–or surprised. Says Ned should go ahead and make the call, which he does. Oh, and in the sporting news, it did rain, and Peggy O’Toole came through like a champ. Ned’s won a tidy sum. But his bookie has disappeared. Somebody owes him money! (Westlake never stopped referencing Hammett).
Turns out the bookie, named Despain, also held paper on Taylor Henry, who was known to be careless about things like debts of honor. Could Despain be the killer? That would make Ned’s life easier in some ways, harder in others (he needs that dough). He tells Paul he’s going to pop over to New York, where this welsher is holed up, and just to make things legal, Paul should get him sworn in as a deputy sheriff or something equivalent. It ends up being special prosecutor for the DA’s office. Easier to fix.
Paul’s not happy about any of this, but Ned’s a dinner guest at Paul’s house when he makes this odd request. Hard for him to say no, since Ned is saying that if he can’t collect his winnings, after finally winning, it’s going to make him feel like he’s fated to lose. Is this the real reason why he wants to go? I have no idea. Maybe Ned doesn’t either. He improvises a lot. Knows where he’s going when he gets there.
Before Ned leaves, he talks to Opal, Paul’s daughter. They’re pretty tight, or they were. He’s almost a big brother to her. He knows right away she’s lying when she says she hadn’t seen Taylor Henry for weeks. Her main reaction to this is to wonder if Ned and her father had been spying on her trysts with Taylor. Ned hadn’t been. Good bet Paul had. The last thing she says, before Chapter 1 ends, is that she’s pretty sure she was in love with Taylor Henry. It goes without saying that she’s thinking that’s what got him killed.
Ned gets to New York, finds Despain, gets his money, and comes back fairly well convinced that Despain didn’t kill Taylor Henry (but he’d do for a fall guy if one was needed). Ned is a very reluctant detective indeed, since he’d really rather not know if Paul is the killer. All the more since if he was, Paul should have told him already. They’re supposed to be pals. And you don’t keep your second in command in the dark on something this big.
So that’s the set-up. There’s a few more elements to be introduced, like the diabolical Shad O’Rory, an Irish gangster who speaks with the expected brogue (not too thick, and neither is he). He’s Paul’s principal rival, hoping to exploit his vulnerabilities to take control of the city himself. Ned’s got him pretty well scouted, but Shad’s got a few tricks up his sleeve, and some formidable henchmen, one of whom is a real bulldog–not a metaphor, he’s literally a dog, with a mind like a steel trap. Also not a metaphor.
The big X-factor is Ned’s attractiveness to women, which he seems to find more of a nuisance than anything else. Women hold a lot of the secrets in this story, and they insist on sharing them with Ned. Now in the second movie adaptation, with Alan Ladd–which probably a lot more people know than the novel–there’s a strong emphasis on the relationship between Ned and Janet. Because Ned and Janet are played by Alan Ladd and Veronica Lake, who had been established as a screen team by This Gun For Hire, an equally misleading adaptation of a Graham Greene novel Westlake was influenced by.
As often happened with Hammett, the first adaptation was more faithful to the book, but it was a later film that stuck in the public imagination. Movies like big romantic pairings, and the problem with a straight-up adaptation is that the big romantic pairing in the novel is between two men, isn’t sexual in nature (I guess you could figure it that way, but you’d be figuring wrong), and doesn’t have a happy ending. (And if they’d been true to the book, neither would the Ladd/Lake thing, but after This Gun For Hire, the populace would be jonesing for them to get a break, so why not? Hollywood.)
The Glass Key isn’t really about sex, though. And Ned isn’t really about Janet. He likes her and all, but he likes other women too. He drives one man to suicide just by making love to his wife by the fireside, in the man’s house, while the poor guy watches. Ned feels bad about this. But he feels bad about lots of things he’s going to do anyway. And the guy had it coming. He ends up with the one girl he should have stayed away from, but it’s impossible to believe they’ll be together very long.
In spite of my penchant for blow-by-blow synopses, I find myself oddly disinclined to go into all the funny things Ned Beaumont finds to do in this book. Seems like every other chapter, he’s running around in the dark, covered in mud (I think that only happens twice). Literal and metaphorical mud.
He gets cussed out, beaten up, tied up, mauled by a dog, put in the hospital (where he engages in the standard Hammett banter with a cute nurse who kind of rolls her eyes at him while batting them at the same time), and somehow he just keeps bouncing back, finding a new angle, homing in closer and closer to the truth that he never wanted to begin with, but he’s going to get it anyway, because he’s the detective in this story, like it or not.
To me, the best Hammett novels–by which I mean the other four–make all the ‘hugger-mugger’ of the genre work for them, with them–a feature instead of a bug. But The Glass Key seems more a prisoner of the clichés it’s coining than the master of them. They distract from the story that’s really being told here–which is about Ned and Paul. We don’t see enough of Paul, because Paul’s got to remain oblique, so we keep thinking he’s the killer. To distract from who the real killer is. And yet I spotted the killer (after a few false guesses) and I never do that. Well, hardly ever.
Paul and Ned know their friendship is on the rocks, but they don’t want to let it go. They know they’ll never find this kind of connection with another human being, ever. I think maybe this is my favorite scene in the whole book, where Ned very nearly walks out on Paul in a white hot rage (he gets those a lot).
This argument is what you might call the practice break-up, early on in the book. Every relationship on the rocks has one. Like every Fred Fitch review has an over-long quote.
Ned Beaumont emptied his seidel and let the front legs of his chair come down on the floor. “I told you it wouldn’t do any good,” he said. “Have it your own way. Keep on thinking that what was good enough for the old Fifth is good enough anywhere.”
In Madvig’s voice there was something of resentment and something of humility when he asked: “You don’t think much of me as a big-time politician, do you, Ned?”
Now Ned Beaumont’s face flushed. He said: “I didn’t say that, Paul.”
“But that’s what it amounts to, isn’t it?” Madvig insisted.
“No, but I do think you’ve let yourself be outsmarted this time. First you let the Henrys wheedle you into backing the Senator. There was your chance to go in and finish an enemy who was cornered, but that enemy happened to have a daughter and social position and what not, so you—”
“Cut it out, Ned,” Madvig grumbled.
Ned Beaumont’s face became empty of expression. He stood up saying, “Well, I must be running along,” and turned to the door.
Madvig was up behind him immediately, with a hand on his shoulder, saying: “Wait, Ned.”
Ned Beaumont said: “Take your hand off me.” He did not look around.
Madvig put his other hand on Ned Beaumont’s arm and turned him around. “Look here, Ned,” he began.
Ned Beaumont said: “Let go.” His lips were pale and stiff.
Madvig shook him. He said: “Don’t be a God-damned fool. You and I—”
Ned Beaumont struck Madvig’s mouth with his left fist. Madvig took his hands away from Ned Beaumont and fell back two steps. While his pulse had time to beat perhaps three times his mouth hung open and astonishment was in his face. Then his face darkened with anger and he shut his mouth tight, so his jaw was hard and lumpy. He made fists of his hands, hunched his shoulders, and swayed forward.
Ned Beaumont’s hand swept out to the side to grasp one of the heavy glass seidels on the table, though he did not lift it from the table. His body leaned a little to that side as he had leaned to get the seidel. Otherwise he stood squarely confronting the blond man. His face was drawn thin and rigid, with white lines of strain around the mouth. His dark eyes glared fiercely into Madvig’s blue ones.
They stood thus, less than a yard apart—one blond, tall and powerfully built, leaning far forward, big shoulders hunched, big fists ready; the other dark of hair and eye, tall and lean, body bent a little to one side with an arm slanting down from that side to hold a heavy glass seidel by its handle—and except for their breathing there was no sound in the room. No sound came in from the bar-room on the other side of the thin door, the rattling of glasses nor the hum of talk nor the splash of water.
When quite two minutes had passed Ned Beaumont took his hand away from the seidel and turned his back to Madvig. Nothing changed in Ned Beaumont’s face except that his eyes, when no longer focused on Madvig’s, became hard and cold instead of angrily glaring. He took an unhurried step towards the door.
Madvig spoke hoarsely from deep down in him. “Ned.”
Ned Beaumont halted. His face became paler. He did not turn around.
Madvig said: “You crazy son of a bitch.”
Then Ned Beaumont turned around, slowly. Madvig put out an open hand and pushed Ned Beaumont’s face sidewise, shoving him off balance so he had to put a foot out quickly to that side and put a hand on one of the chairs at the table.
Madvig said: “I ought to knock hell out of you.”
Ned Beaumont grinned sheepishly and sat down on the chair he had staggered against.
Madvig sat down facing him and knocked on the top of the table with his seidel.
The bar-tender opened the door and put his head in.
“More beer,” Madvig said. From the bar-room, through the open door, came the sound of men talking and the sound of glasses rattling against glasses and against wood.
Who needs a faithful film adaptation, when you can see every bit of it in your head, and cast any actors you want to read the lines? Or hey, maybe you and a friend you used to have.
And how does it end? That part the movies are always faithful to (more or less). Ned saves Paul’s bacon, deals with Paul’s enemies, fixes all Paul’s messes, leaving Mr. Madvig the unquestioned master of this lousy little town (where even the reformers are shacked up with gangsters)–and walks away into the noirish sunset with Janet, who despises Paul, and finding out he didn’t kill her brother didn’t change that one bit. Leaving Paul Madvig an empty burned-out husk of a man. Not to mention a really old joke–ever hear the one about the guy whose best friend stole his girl?
There’s no sense of masculine triumph here. Ned has declared his independence at last, but he’s still a gambler. He’s broken his losing streak, but there’ll be others, and he won’t have Paul to bail him out. Janet will get tired of slumming, or Ned will get tired of her feeling like she’s slumming–that’s not a relationship with a future.
Paul will rebuild his machine, make it more legit, but there’ll be this dead look in his eyes where a light once burned. Ned will go from one misadventure to the next, but he’ll never trust anyone else the same way again. It couldn’t end any other way, because they wanted different things. Damon and Pythias probably broke up over a woman too. (Unless it was another man, you know, ancient Greece.)
The Glass Key turns out to be Janet’s metaphor, from a dream she had, and it’s not a hopeful one. There are some good scenes between her and Ned, but Hammett was capable of much better, and the dreams are a bit too Freudian for his style. He’s getting too fancy, trying to move up in the literary world. It doesn’t suit him any more than it does Paul and Ned. What he had going down on those mean streets was better than most of those society authors, anyway.
I will say, with Ned Beaumont, he’s anticipated the existentialist anti-heroes of Sartre and Camus by about a decade. And I’m sure a bunch of French critics have said this already, but in French, right?
So as a story, I find it fascinating but inadequate. As a character study, provocative but unfinished. As a template for future mystery authors, and maybe even some non-genre scribes, influential as all hell, but that begs the question–did any of the books based on it hit the target Hammett aimed at here?
One of those authors, you must realize, was Donald E. Westlake. This was the very first target he aimed at in the very first novel he wrote under his own name. Why would he do something so hubristic? Because, I hubristically argue, he agreed with me that Hammett hadn’t hit the mark. So maybe he could.
But before he set his sights on that bullseye, there were some other archers stringing their bows. Let’s talk about them. Next time. In the meantime, in-between time, here’s some book covers.
Now go have a beer with a friend. That crazy son of a bitch. Or daughter.
The Westlake Review 