Sherry Chandler

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)

__________
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.

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.

Cat with a cocktail party and a lake

The house was leaking guests out into the evening air now. Voices were fading, cars were starting, goodbyes were bouncing around like rubber balls. I went to the french windows and out onto a flagged terrace. The ground sloped towards the lake which was as motionless as a sleeping cat. There was a short wooden pier down there with a rowboat tied to it by a white painter. Towards the far shore, which wasn’t very far, a black waterhen was doing lazy curves, like a skater. They didn’t seem to cause as much as a shallow ripple.

— Raymond Chandler, from The Long Good-Bye, text from The Midnight Raymond Chandler (Houghton Mifflin, 1971)