Friday, August 01, 2008

Quote of the Week

I've missed a few weeks of these, because I ran out of my stored-up quotes and haven't been struck by anything in the books I've been reading. And you know what that means? I've been reading the wrong damn books.

"He'd been cheating Death almost from the beginning: at the age of nineteen, leaving his parents' home for the first time, Pain -- he'd not yet added the final e to his name -- set out for London and was recruited at dockside for service on a privateer ship called the Terrible, commanded by one Captain Death. Thomas's father showed up on the docks in time to save him from what was either a very good allegory or a very bad Ingmar Bergman film. The Terrible sailed without Pain, and Captain Death and the crew were slaughtered."
- Paul Collins, The Trouble With Tom: The Stranger Afterlife and Times of Thomas Paine, pp.19-20

2 comments:

Unknown said...

At Confluence, David Hartwell sold me a book, purely on the basis odf the opening line:

“When I finally caught up with Abraham Trahearne, he was drinking beer with an alcoholic bulldog named Fireball Roberts in a ramshackle joint just outside of Sonora, California, drinking the heart right out of a fine spring afternoon.” -- The Last Good kiss by James Crumley

Andrew Wheeler said...

James Crumley's first three mysteries -- the ones written in the '70s and '80s -- are damn good. The later, '90s, books aren't as strong but still have their good points.

(The other two are The Wrong Case and Dancing Bear.)

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