I keep losing the book I'm reading. It's a collection of Raymond Chandler stories, not very long, and I've been reading it for nearly five months. I'll read a few pages, set it down, and when I look back down it will be gone. Vanished. Not even a puff of smoke or an oversized shoe print to mark its passing.
It always turns back up, the same page marked, nary a new scuff on its thick paper cover.
It's a collection of mysteries, but it's not one of those books that opens its mouth and inhales you, so that you're watching dark shadows expecting its characters to come creeping out. I don't stand outside my house, hand on the doorknob, resigned to the likelihood that inside will be a strange man (or a not so strange man) with a gun, calmly smoking a cigarette.
Anyway, I going to try to finish it this weekend. Because it's good, but also because I'm tired of this game. If this is the paperback's answer to enhanced e-books, I think someone is barking up the wrong entertainment tree.
It's probably just out in the night-enshrouded back alleys of L.A., probably in the back of a hock shop watching some palooka packing a heater hiding around the corner waiting to get the drop on the doll in the furs waiting by the flivver but he doesn't want to tip his mitt.
ReplyDeleteNot yet.
Very interesting...a disappearing mystery book...
ReplyDeleteIt's like the body that's there and then isn't there, Ace. And I can't show surprise when it's not there, because then the one who moved it will know I saw it and didn't report it. Also, how is it possible that happens multiple times in his stories?
ReplyDeleteI'm waiting for the thriller novel in my purse to lead me into a vast web of conspiracies and excitement, April. :) So far, no go.