Читать книгу Klick's Shorts - Milam Smith - Страница 4

Klick’s Books

YOU ARE WHAT YOU READ

COUPLES

THE MANAGER

MY TYPE OF GAL

SPANK ME

WOULDN’T YOU KNOW IT

YOU ARE WHAT YOU READ

Times were rough. I sat in a local, national-chain’s bookstore perusing a book I couldn’t afford to buy. It wasn’t the latest Robert B. Parker novel, but the new series without Spenser, his Boston P.I. Trouble in Paradise (now there’s an original title, eh?) features Stone, an ex-L.A. cop whose relocated to the East Coast town of Paradise.

Besides the free reading, it was great training for a Private Investigator. Watching all types of different people, matching their looks with what books they browsed or were purchasing.

Like the Twenty-something longhair, wolfish beard and mustache who was foraging in the Science Fiction aisles. He looked like perhaps a Round Table Knight from The Broken Sword. Sword is a modern-day tale of the King Arthur myth, mixed with New Age concepts of reincarnation and One Consciousness. He was joined by his band of fellow knights. The large fellow who looked to favor a tankard of Mead several times a day, a young lad who might well qualify as a knight-in-training, and the fair damsel who may be more a tart that serves the needs of the whole squad.

Over by the Film shelves a gangly young man sat on the floor hunched over a book that belonged in the Fiction section. It was by Peter Farrelly, one of the Farrelly Brothers who served us up Kingpin, Dumb and Dumber and Something About Mary. The book was Farrelly’s supposed ‘fictionalized’ account of his initial sojourn into the world of L.A. and the film industry. Titled simply The Comedy Writer, it was a finely accurate portrayal of the morass that is Hollywood.

I’d been there. I knew.

Last week I had scouted out Elmore Leonard’s latest release, something that I had hoped to see someday and that day finally arrived, The Tonto Woman. It features his old Western Short Stories, as well as a couple of newer ones. None of which I had read. As I devoured them I wondered what other readers might have thought of his quirky style with a Western motif.

Like I did, I’m sure they thought, “Hey, this guy is good.”