Death in the Andes by Mario Vargas Llosa (Picador 1993)

 

When he saw the Indian woman appear at the door of the shack, Lituma guessed what she was going to say. And she did say it, but she was mumbling in Quechua while the saliva gathered at the corners of her toothless mouth.

“What’s she saying, Tomasito?”

“I couldn’t catch it, Corporal.”

The Civil Guard addressed her in Quechua, indicating with gestures that she should speak more slowly. The woman repeated the indistinguishable sounds that affected Lituma like savage music. He suddenly felt very uneasy.

“What’s she saying?”

“It seems her husband disappeared,” murmured his adjutant. “Four days ago.”

“That means we’ve lost three,” Lituma stammered, feeling the perspiration break out on his face. “Son of a bitch.”

“So what should we do, Corporal?”

“Take her statement.” A shudder ran up and down Lituma’s spine. “Have her tell you what she knows.”

“But what’s going on?” exclaimed the Civil Guard. “First the mute, then the albino, now one of the highway foremen. It can’t be, Corporal.”

Maybe not, but it was happening, and now for the third time. Lituma pictured the blank faces and icy narrow eyes that the people in Naccos—laborers at the camp and comuneros, the Indians from the traditional community—would all turn toward him when he asked if they knew the whereabouts of this woman’s husband, and he felt the same discouragement and helplessness he had experienced earlier when he tried to question them about the other men who were missing: heads shaking no, monosyllables, evasive glances, frowns, pursed lips, a presentiment of menace. It would be no different this time.

Nick's Trip by George Pelecanos (Back Bay Books 1993)

 

The night Billy Goodrich walked in I was tending bar at a place called the Spot, a bunker of painted cinder block and forty-watt bulbs at the northwest corner of Eighth and G in Southeast. The common wisdom holds that there are no neighborhood joints left in D.C., places where a man can get lost and smoke cigarettes down to the filter and drink beer backed with whiskey. The truth is you have to know where to find them. Where you can find them is down by the river, near the barracks and east of the Hill.

An Arctic wind had dropped into town that evening with the suddenness of a distaff emotion, transforming a chilly December rain into soft, wet snow. At first flake’s notice most of my patrons had bolted out of the warped and rotting door of the Spot, and now, as the snow began to freeze and cover the cold black streets, only a few hard drinkers remained.

One of them, a gin-drenched gentleman by the name of Melvin, sat directly in front of me at the bar. Melvin squinted and attempted to read the titles of the cassettes behind my back. I wiped my hands lethargically on a blue rag that hung from the side of my trousers, and waited with great patience for Melvin to choose the evening’s next musical selection.

Melvin said, “Put on some Barry.”

The Devil Met a Lady by Stuart M. Kaminsky (Mysterious Press 1993)

“If I remain in this room for five more minutes, I will surely go mad, mad, mad,” Bette Davis said, grabbing the sleeve of my jacket as I reached for the door.

She looked into my eyes. Hers were large and determined. Mine were red and beady.

I couldn’t blame her. She’d been holed up in a small room in the Great Palms Hotel on Main for almost twenty-four hours with nothing to eat but room-service ham-and-cheese on white and nothing to drink but water and Ruppert Mellow Light Beer. She had the bed. I had the undersized sofa.”

The Great Palms Hotel was a good place to get lost—not in the top twenty-five percent and not in the bottom ten, usually hovering not far from respectable mediocrity.

Blood Sympathy by Reginald Hill (Harper 1993)

Lutonians talk about Hermsprong with a muted horror which is almost pride. Here is the original urban black hole into which all social subsidy and welfare work is sucked without trace. Perhaps the best account of the estate was given by its senior social worker on Radio Luton shortly before her breakdown.

‘Hermsprong is a truly organic community,’ she said in a very quiet, very restrained voice. ‘Here everyone has a place and a function. Here there are none so poor they cannot be robbed, none so insignificant they cannot be reviled, none so inoffensive they cannot be hated. This is the far end of Thatcherism. On Hermsprong they need no nanny state, they already take care of each other.’

Compared with this, Rasselas was a health resort.

The Shark-Infested Custard by Charles Willeford (Underwood-Miller Books 1993)

 

What is very sweet, bright yellow, and extremely dangerous?

 --old Miami riddle.

 

PART I

 

    Larry "FUZZ-O" Dolman

 

In Florida, the guilty party who spills everything to the State Attorney first gets immunity...

 

CHAPTER ONE

 

It started out as kind of a joke, and then it wasn't funny any more because money became involved. Deep down, nothing about money is funny.

Tramps, Workmates and Revolutionaries edited by H. Gustav Klaus (Journeyman Press 1993)

The military had taken control of the tiny station, but he hung about aimlessly, thinking to be of service to the indifferent officers. As the day waned parties of troops filed out of the village, 'pickets' the officers called them. They would be on the watch, he thought for  . . . for federals, bands of fellows like Nat Sayer, Jimmy Algood, Geoffry Field and young Chris Wrigley, and others who had gone from Wickworth. It wasn't pleasant to think of their being shot down by these crisp soldiers. Somehow they seemed too much alike, the troops and the rebel villagers. But it was no business of his, Ben Thatcher's; he was a loyal subject - never got himself mixed up with politics.

(from 'Sabotage' by H. R. Barbor)

Dangerous by Moonlight by Leslie Thomas (Mandarin 1993)

Winter suited Willesden. Its trees were created to drip, its canal to wear a muffler of mist, its pavements and roofs to reflect the lights of winter streets and the cloudy winter moon; few daytime things decorated the north-west London sky more poetically than the steam clouds from the  power station cooling towers flying from the hair of God. The simile was not of Davies' making—he was of simpler stuff—but from the imagination of Mod, his friend, the philosopher of the dole queue.

'Winter becomes Willesden,' he repeated in a literary whisper, surveying both from the public library window. 'In the way that mourning becomes Electra.' He turned his bulbous eyes on Davies. 'If you get my drift.'

'Of course,' replied Davies. 'Totally.' He glanced at the reading-room clock. 'Isn't it time you knocked off,' he suggested.

'You wouldn't be the detective you are if you did not possess such powers of observation,' nodded Mod deeply.

'The little hand's on five and the big hand's nearly on twelve,' added Davies.

Ponderously Mod began to fold his books. 'Opening time,' he agreed sagely. 'What deduction!" He rubbed his eyes. It had been a long day in the reading room. He made a ritual of the closing of covers and Davies sat down, damp in his mackintosh, and waited while he completed it.

Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven by Sherman Alexie (Grove Press 1993)

I was terrified by all these big-time agents and editors, and especially of one particular agent, who enjoyed more fame and fortune than any of her clients did.

"Send me the manuscript today," the famous agent ordered.

Bullied, terrified, and naive, I sent her my manuscript of short stories, glacially printed out by a five-hundred-dollar Brother word processor.

"You're not ready," she said after she'd read them. "I'll take you on as a client, but we're going to have to work on these stories for a year or two before I send them out to publishers."

I was shocked. I had been dreaming about immediate fame and fortune.

"But wait," I said. "I thought I was one of the major lyric voices of our time."

"According to the manuscript I've got sitting in front of me, you're not even one of the major lyric voices on my desk."

Ouch. That one really hurt. And this woman wanted to be my agent? Was that how agents were supposed to talk to their clients? And who the hell was I, calling myself one of the major lyric voices of our time? I was wondering if I should get business cards that identified me as such, or perhaps leave it on my answering machine.

Hello, you've reached Sherman Alexie, one of the major lyric voices of our time. Please leave a message if you're not too intimidated and I'll get back to you, with my versatile and mellifluous voice, as soon as possible.

Of course, these days my wife, Diane, only refers to me as "one of the major lyric voices of our time" when I stutter or mispronounce a word or say something so inane and arrogant that it defies logic. A few years ago, as we argued about the potential danger in using a cracked coffeepot, I shouted, "You can't heat cracked glass! It will shatter! I majored in chemistry! I know glass! What do you know about glass?"

Yep, I have just offered you scientific proof of the majorness of my voice.

"But the thing is," I said to the famous agent. "I think my stories are pretty good. And I hate to be repetitive, but they said I'm one of the major lyric voices of our time."

"These stories are not major. But you've got potential. I'm a great editor. If we take it slow, we can make this book the best it can be."

"I don't know," I said. "I was hoping things would go much faster."

"Going fast would be a mistake for you."

"I don't want to go slow. I can't afford to go slow."

"Then we won't be working together. Call me if you change your mind."

She hung up without saying good-bye. I'd always heard of people who hung up without saying good-bye. I'd seen them on television and in movies, but I'd never talked to somebody who hung up without saying good-bye. She remains the only person I know who has ever hung up on me without saying good-bye.

I still owe her a phone call.

I would love to call her up and say, "Well, Miss Fifteen Per-cent, we published this book at the speed of the light, and it's now in its 1,220,342nd printing, and it was the basis for a really cool movie called Smoke Signals. Maybe you've heard of the movie? It was released by Miramax, yes, Miramax, that's spelled M-I-R-A-M-A-X, and the audience won the Audience Award and the Filmmakers' Trophy at the Sundance Film Festival in 1998. Yes, that's Robert Freaking Redford's Sundance Film Festival! And I've published one million books since that first one, and I've hugged Stephen King and been kissed on the cheek by Ally Sheedy and sat in a big couch in Kareem Abdul-Jabbar's living room while my feet dangled off the floor, so perhaps you were wrong about EVERYTHING! And by the way, what do you know about glass?"

As they say, revenge is a dish best served with the introduction to the tenth-anniversary edition of a book of short stories.

Eventually, despite my narcissism and naïveté, and thanks to the recommendations of friends, I met the agent Nancy Stauffer Cahoon, who, after reading my manuscript, said something beautiful and surprising.

"That story, 'Flight,' the one about the kid and the jet," she said. "That reminds me of James Tate's poem 'The Lost Pilot.'"

"Wow," I said, falling in literary love. "That story was directly influenced by that poem. Nobody has ever noticed that."

"You had me at hello," Renée Zellweger said to Tom Cruise.

"You had me at James Tate," I said to Nancy.

Okay, I didn't really say that to her. But I was impressed that she talked to me first in artistic terms and only later in financial terms. I hired her immediately (or does the agent hire the writer?) worked with her to edit the manuscript, and immediately cut "Flight" and a dozen other stories . . . 

(From the Introduction to the tenth anniversary edition.)

Blackburn, a Novel by Bradley Denton (Picador USA 1993)

Blackburn was surprised that it was so easy. He hadn't thought he would be able to shoot another man. But here was Number Two trying to pull on his pants. The man was big, and his footfalls shook the telephone on the nightstand. A hole in his stomach pumped dark blood. The blood glistened on the man's skin, on the bedsheets, on the floor.

The woman on the bed was screaming. She scooted back against the headboard and stuffed part of the top sheet into her mouth. She screamed louder.

"Don't do that," Blackburn said. His ears were buzzing from the gunshot.

Number Two pulled his pants up as far as his knees, then fell. The telephone jumped. The man grunted. He lay on his side, and the blood ran down his belly to the floor. The woman continued to scream. Her screams were why Blackburn had come into the room. But there was no need for them now.

"It's all right," Blackburn said.

The woman screamed and screamed.

"What else could I do?" Blackburn asked.

From the Velvets to the Voidoids - A Pre-Punk History for a Post-Punk World by Clinton Heylin (Penguin Books 1993)

Being 'more suburban', they had something in common with other CBGBs favourites that existed largely outside the scene. The Shirts, like those other local faves the Tuff Darts, were more interested in securing a record deal than in reviving rock & roll.

Annie Golden: We were the hicks from Brooklyn, never aspiring to go across the bridge, but we had read about the Mercer Arts Centre, which had just crumbled, and the back room at Max's, and we went down to see Patti Smith at CBGBs . . . We were holed up in Brooklyn, we all had day jobs, we were rehearsing eight to ten hours into the morning, saving money for equipment. Bands in Manhattan were doing it another way. They were like artists; they were doing minimalist rock and they were starving. But we had this big light show and a big PA.