Sherry Chandler

Cat with femme fatale

I lifted myself out of the pool and walked to the guest cottage to shower and dress. I heard her laugh behind me. When I came back out she was sitting on a cushioned, scrolled iron chair with her legs crossed. I sat down on a dry mat on the back edge of the diving board.

“You make me think of a cat that’s trying to like sitting on a hot stove,” she said.

— James Lee Burke, from A Morning for Flamingos (Little Brown and Company, 1990)

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P.S. I’ve considered this date and decided I don’t have much I want to say about it except that it’s D. H. Lawrence’s birthday. You can find a selection of Lawrence poetry at the link. Here is a link to my all-time favorite Lawrence poem, “Snake.” A video here but I don’t guarantee its quality.

Cat with Cajun

When I turned into my block my body was running with sweat, and I could feel the sun’s heat deep in my skin. I did fifty push-ups off the back steps, fifty stomach crunches, one hundred leg lifts, and twenty-five chin-ups on the iron stanchion that supported the clothesline, while my neighbor’s orange cat watched me from the garage roof. Then I sat quietly in the grass, my forearms on my knees, breathing the sweet smell of the clover, my heartbeat as regular and strong and temporarily as confident as it had been twenty years before. [p.160]

— James Lee Burke, Black Cherry Blues (Little, Brown, and Company, 1989)

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Hardboiled detectives are all fitness nuts these days. Philip Marlowe must be turning over in his metaphorical grave.

Meanwhile, here’s a “sobering” headline from the NYTimes. It just breaks my heart. Rise of the Super-Rich Hits a Sobering Wall.

Jane and Annie

Calamity Jane, photo from Wikimedia Commons.

James Lee Burke writes mysteries about a Cajun named Robicheaux whose life is beset by calamity. Mary Jane Cannary-Burke is better known as Calamity Jane (1852-1903). Barack Obama may have been better served by comparing Hillary Clinton to Jane than to Annie Oakley (1860-1926). Jane, though involved in exploits enough for a woman of her time, was not averse to exaggeration. Annie not only made good on her brags but also became a considerable philanthropist for women�s issues. She offered to raise a company of �lady sharpshooters� to serve in the Spanish American War but William McKinley did not accept.

A list

Asked to pick something as simple as a favorite color, I am apt to be catapulted off the Bridge of Death by the Old Man from Scene 24. About books I am as fickle as Gin (see comment to previous post). I can�t even claim to be serially monogamous because there�s genre to be considered. In mysteries alone, I have run through Agatha Christy, Dorothy L. Sayers, Ngaio Marsh, Rex Stout, John D. McDonald, Ross McDonald, Raymond Chandler, Dick Francis, Tony Hillerman, Edith Pargeter, Martha Grimes, P.D. James, Colin Dexter, Ian Rankin, and now I�m looking to James Lee Burke.