A fun bit of future noir
“Move and I’ll make you breathe funny,” he said, his leathery mouth all stretched out at the corners. The gun looked pretty comfortable in his little black paw. “I’d be pleased to teach you how to blow red bubbles out of your shirt,” he went on. “It’s a little trick I learned last week. I can dish it out as well as take it.”
Nobody dishes it out like Raymond Chandler, but Jonathan Lethem landed a few solid lines in his first novel, Gun, with Occasional Music, which I read on the aeroplane a few days ago.
August 11th, 2008 at 7:01 pm
Lethem’s hard boiled prose is a great modern substitute for chandler! I’ve only read “Motherless Brooklyn”, but it was superb.
I met Lethem once. I wanted to adapt one of his stories, “Martyr & Pesty”, into a short film so I cold contacted him. He was due to visit London and kindly agreed to meet up with me for a coffee while in town. I was really young at the time so have to hand it to the man for humoring my juvenile disposition.