STEPHEN HAWKING: A Life in Science – Michael White and John Gribbin

Some years back I bought a copy of Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time. I knew Hawking was important, that he was cutting edge. I was curious. I don’t think I got past the first page or two. The language of physics was over my head, yet I caught enough to be vaguely intimidated, suspecting if I struggled with it enough to understand where the author was going I’d soon be revisiting my old nightmares about suddenly getting sucked into a black hole.

Well, that danger is abated. I have learned in Stephen Hawking: A Life in Science that black holes are more abundant than visits by Chicken Man: they’re everywhere, they’re everywhere. Presumably sucking sucking sucking… Some—an infinite number, actually--are infinitely smaller than the dot at the end of this sentence. Sucking sucking… But the best news I learned from this fairly-easy-to-follow biography of this incredibly hard-to-understand man is that our entire universe is a black hole—one among an infinite number of universes, all of them black holes. I’d have put an exclamation mark after that last sentence had I not become so astoundingly sophisticated in matters of cosmic theory reading this amazing book, which I picked up for half a buck a couple of weeks ago at the library’s used book sale. It was sitting next to a credibly slim volume titled The Wit and Wisdom of Donald Trump, which, according to my understanding of theories discovered by Stephen Hawking (and my own intuition), possibly itself contains an infinite number of black holes. Needless to say, I had one helluva time trying to decide which of these two possible collections of theoretically possible black holes to spend my fifty cents on.

Now then, here’s my own theory, one which I feel empowered to expound from a foundation of virtual math illiteracy and inherent mistrust of most anyone who seems to know more about something than I do. I would guess such mistrust is explained somewhat, explicitly or by inference, in the fictional Trump book. (Not to worry, there’s no math in this theory): We know that at first few if any human beings knew precisely what the hell Einstein was talking about when he came up with the “special theory of relativity.” It didn’t help that many quickly understood Einstein’s equation E = mc ² because they still didn’t know what the hell he was talking about. To this day I am fairly clueless.

Moving along briskly here, Hawking’s theories of black holes and other celestial phenomena are even more obscure than Einstein’s theories to my cosmically deprived little brain. I enjoyed reading about them, though—the theories—if only because once I realized that I myself might well be a black hole or at least host to a bunch of them my dread of dreaming the damned sucking dream succumbed to an awesome sense of being Mr. Universal Danger, armed with the knowledge I could at whim strike terror in the hearts of anyone who didn’t know the secret that they too might well be black holes or hosts to a multitude thereof. I’d be wearing tights and a cape were I not uncomfortable with the prospect of starting a dangerous fashion trend among the black hole cognoscenti. Or be misunderstood by the folks in the white suits with the tranquilizer darts.

Getting back to my theory, if only a metaphoric handful of physicists, astronomers and mathematicians are hip to the guts of these theories, who's to say they don’t push their equations into a little niche so esoteric only they can credibly pretend the equations make sense? It’s all just theory anyway. No one has ever identified a black hole, nor will anyone ever likely do so, as Hawking assures us. It’s this small coterie of elite scientists we’re supposed to trust. And Hawking seems perhaps more trustworthy than the average brainiac because he suffers from a disease that’s left him almost completely paralyzed.

But we know the guy has a wicked sense of humor, White and Gribbin say so in Stephen Hawking: A Life in Science. Wicked sense of humor. Folks who know him, including White and Gribbin, say you can see the mischief in his face. And he loves to whip around the cloistered Cambridge campus at breakneck speed in his motorized wheelchair. He also loves to whip around dance floors in it, flirting with women. I learned also Hawking has three kids by his wife, whom he left after 25 years to move in with his nurse-come-mistress. Them apples, whattaya think? The guy’s a player! A practical joker/player who just might be putting one over on all of us.

So intrigued was I about halfway through the book I bought the DVD of The Theory of Everything, based on Hawking’s wife Jane’s book about their marriage. The flick left me spellbound. I started sitting around with my head lolling to one side, practicing mischievous grins and smartass quips. What the hell is wrong with me? I couldn’t even help my kids with their geometry homework. Now I’m wondering if geometry is some brainiac joke too.

Maybe I’m presidential timber.

[for more Friday's Forgotten Books check the links on Patti Abbott's unforgettable blog]

SUN MOUNTAIN -- Richard S. Wheeler

I'm finding myself more and more fascinated with history the older I get. Maybe part of the fascination has to do with the fact that events I lived through, heard on the news, read in the newspaper or saw with my own eyes, have since become history. Looking at what is now history that was once part of my life gives my imagination a boost to move further back, to see events before my time differently than I saw them when I studied history in school. The context of living extends perspective in a way that reading about events as an inexperienced youngster never could.

Now, if the histories had been written by Richard Wheeler it might have been different. A masterful writer of historical fiction, Wheeler creates an illusion for the reader to feel he or she is in fact viewing events as they happened. The period in Sun Mountain was the last third of the 19^th century during the silver/gold mining boom and bust of Virginia City, Nevada.

 

The novel unfolds as the memoir of a fictional character—Henry Stoddard—but involves many actual people, including the young Samuel Clemens and other newsmen at the Territorial Enterprise. The newspaper gave Stoddard, one of its reporters, an ideal platform to observe the wild and fascinating milieu and personalities of the mining community made famous worldwide as The Comstock Lode.

Richard S. Wheeler

With this highly personalized device Wheeler spoons out his vast knowledge of the mining industry, the customs of the day and events great and small, locally, regionally and beyond in such vivid detail he held me spellbound throughout the story.

Had Sun Mountain been part of a course when I was in high school or even college I might have become a history buff much much sooner. 

[for more Friday's Forgotten Books check the links on Patti Abbott's unforgettable blog]

 

Missing Ed Gorman

I was in bed June 19, 2005 when I became Sam McCain. It happened during a flash of magic, one of those unpredictable windows in the space-time continuum one reads about in certain kinds of fantasy fiction. Had I been reading Metamorphosis during that bewitched, cosmic shift you might at this moment be reading combinations of only h and i and s to represent the hissing sounds I presume Kafka’s central character might produce. Thankfully no magic window opened when I read Metamorphosis, not like the one with Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow, a mystery novel featuring the aforementioned Sam McCain, whom I became instead of Kafka’s humble dung beetle. I don’t mind admitting this, that I became the fictional lawyer/private eye, in part because the character I was reading about, an engaging little Irishman, himself admits to a cross-identity assumption, that he secretly believes he’s Robert Ryan, the tall, strapping movie actor.

  Mixed up, mysteried up, shook up world, to play with Lou Reed's little ditty about a fellow who became a gal named Lola. Oh, there's no Lola in any of the ten Sam McCain mysteries. Straight as can be in that sense. Not that I as McCain nor McCain himself—even in his secret Robert Ryan persona, presumably--would have found anything wrong had any of the plots been muddled that way! That which I've read of Ed Gorman's phenomenal literary canon, celebrates hope in a world seen with unblinking yet tender clarity no matter how jinxed the view. It was my sense of this vision at the start of Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow that grabbed me after setting me up with the epigraph:

 

I smell blood and an era of prominent madmen. —W. H. Auden

Then:

“GEE,” THE BEAUTIFUL PAMELA Forrest said. “He actually looks kinda dopey.”

And he did.

Here he was, the world’s first nuclear-powered bogeyman, and he looked like the uncle everybody feels sorry for because he’s fat and sloppy.

Nikita Khrushchev. Premier of the Soviet Union. The world’s number one Russian. Not to mention Communist.

Athough I did not know at this point it was Sam McCain speaking, already I was him—if only to enjoy his proximity to "the beautiful Pamela Forrest." Little did I know how frustrating this proximity would prove to be for both McCain and me as I worked my way through the McCain saga. Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow is the second in the series. I read it first, not having any knowledge of McCain or Ed Gorman, because it was a Father's Day gift from my wife. She had inscribed it sweetly, hinting that perhaps I would enjoy reading it "while cruising to Bermuda." I couldn't wait for the cruise, which came later, so my initiation to the Sam McCain phenomenon, which led to a treasured friendship with his creator, came landlocked next to the woman whose thoughtful gift had introduced us, and who too was reading during our habitual read-before-sleep time, which, in retrospect, might otherwise have been spent more wisely, as the title's yearning question no longer for us begs a fortuitous answer. Happier exponentially answering the question more directly: the immediate tomorrow of my discovering Ed Gorman has come and gone but I cannot begin to imagine, no matter how many tomorrows I may have left, answering that question any other way than Hell Yes!

Thinking back, it occurs to me there probably was no magic flash that turned me into Sam McCain that fateful eve. At least not in a fantasy physics sense, as Ed Gorman, whose oeveure includes science fiction as well as westerns, noir, horror, and genres I'm likely forgetting, would have told me. Too modest to admit it, though, he'd merely have flashed a leprechaun grin at the suggestion it was his storytelling sleight of hand alone that made the magic. And then he'd have reminded me of the things McCain and I had in common: McCain practiced law and worked as an investigator for the local judge in his hometown, the fictional Black River Falls, Iowa; my dad practiced law in our small Wisconsin town where I was a high school senior when Krushchev visited Roswell Garst's Iowa farm. The detective part? I'd been reading detective novels from the time I discovered them in the little bookcase my dad kept near his favorite chair in our living room. Ed Gorman captured me by capturing the mood and the feel of a small prairie town and its people. Especially Sam McCain, whom, had I not grown up to be a mild-mannered newspaper reporter (sans tights and cape), might well have had a career quite like that of my fictional alter ego.

McCain is not my father's detective type. He's neither the classic hard-boiled nor cozy mystery solver. Were he Jewish he'd be describing himself what in Yiddish is called a schlemiel, a chump. But that is just his modest way of self-appraisal. In truth he's a smart, tough little guy who can face his fears, handle himself, and get the job done. He doesn't often get the girl, although not for lack of trying (see opening reference to "the beautiful Pamela Forrest"). He loves his sister (I have one, too) and his parents. One description of his dad, in the first book of the series—The Day the Music Died—is so honest and poignant it chokes my throat up with each reading:

I still remember standing on the platform at the train depot and watching my dad wave to us when he came home from World War II. I was shocked. My parents are small people. My mom is five-two and has never cleared ninety pounds. But I’d grown up with my mom and was used to her size. My dad was a different matter. I’d seen a lot of John Wayne and Ronald Reagan— two of the many brave movie stars who hadn’t actually gone to war— war movies, and so I just figured my dad would be this big heroic kind of guy, too. He’d been gone a long time. Well, he wasn’t big and heroic-looking. In fact, he looked like a kid. He was five-six and weighed maybe 130 and had dishwater blond hair. His khaki uniform looked too big for him, gave him a vulnerability that made him seem even less soldierly. He was an utter stranger to me. The last time I’d seen him I’d been seven years old. I felt sort of ashamed of him, actually, how young and vulnerable he looked in the midst of all these other towering GIs. Why couldn’t I have a dad who looked like Robert Mitchum? And I’ve always been ashamed of myself for feeling that. I know that when I see him in his coffin over at the Fitzpatrick Funeral Home, that’s what I’ll think of, *how I betrayed him in my heart that first day he came back from the war.

And this, lest there be any doubt about our (McCain's and my) political leanings:

Dad had all the insecurities that go along with being a small and somewhat delicate man. But instead of using them to hate or bully, he’d turned them into empathy and wisdom. He always watched the CBS Evening News with Douglas Edwards and watched what the white cops were doing to black people trying to ride whites-only city buses. Stuff like that got to him as much as it did me. Even my mom, who didn’t vote because she hated all politicians equally, had tears in her eyes when she saw little Negro kids blasted off the streets with fire hoses and their parents clubbed to their knees.

The McCain series is set in the years 1959-71, with their pop-song titles corresponding to the times of the stories. The first one, The Day the Music Died, begins on the day commemorated by Don McLean’s eponymous song, when a plane carrying rock ‘n’ roll stars Buddy Holly, Richie Valens, J.P. “The Big Bopper” Richardson crashed near Clear Lake, Iowa, killng all aboard.

The novel opens with Sam McCain and “the beautiful Pamela Forrest” driving home from the group’s final performance at Clear Lake.

McCain isn’t one of those fictional characters who never ages despite a series span of decades. His finale, Riders on the Storm, has him recently returning home from a five-month hospital stint after a drunken jeep accident when he was a National Guardsman. He’s lost some of his smartalecky edge. In fact, well, let’s let him tell us:

 

I top a small hill and gaze down at the moonlit homes stretching out before me. Senators love to bluster about how the rest of the world envies us, and when you see this portrait in shadow and light you have to agree with them. Solid houses, good jobs, bright futures. Too bad we were losing thousands of our troops— not to mention even more thousands of innocents— just so two fine fellows named Johnson and Nixon could play John Wayne…

This was the seventies. I indulged in liquor, grass and sex. I’d lost my religious faith, I’d lost most of my faith in the political system and I knew how corrupt our system of justice was. And if I had to sit down and count up the number of lies I’d told in my life, a fair share to women I’d cared about, I would be one hundred and thirty-four before I could stand up again.

Sam McCain died 17 days ago, along with the man who gave him the life he shared with me. Ed Gorman promised me several months ago in the last email I got from him that another McCain novel was in the works. I kinda knew better, because Ed had been seriously ill during the years I came to know him after that auspicious Father’s Day 11 years ago. A type of cancer known as multiple myeloma finally killed him. I was never blessed with the honor and the pleasure of meeting him in person, or even speaking with him on the phone. But there was never any doubt he was a friend—from our first exchange of emails. And dammit now he’s gone for good, and so is Sam McCain. 

 

FAHRENHEIT 451 – Ray Bradbury

My librarian friend Angie shared an article on Facebook decrying our frightening decline in reading, and its effect on our elections. Introducing the article, Angie posed the question, “What one book do you think everyone should read at least once?”

Picked your book yet? You know which one I chose. After scanning in my head many of the books you likely are considering yourself at this moment, Fahrenheit 451 seemed so obvious when my scan reached it that my brain pushed select and I proceeded with no more ado.

It was high time, too, as, unthinkable though it may be of a lifelong avid reader, I’d not yet opened the cover of the 1953 science fiction classic about a dystopian future where books—any books—were illegal. So illegal, they were, that fire departments comprised, instead of firefighters, firestarters. The alarms they raced to answer in their kerosene-laden trucks were called in by people reporting a suspicion that books were at a particular address. The books were burned at the scene, usually along with the building and, on at least one occasion, the building’s book-hoarding occupant.

I’d always been aware of Fahrenheit 451’s book-burning theme as well as the title’s significance (the supposed temperature at which books ignite). Maybe the idea was too distressing to wish to read a story about it. Then there was the science fiction factor, a category that’s never generated much enthusiasm in me. I avoided the movie as well, despite a lifelong infatuation with Julie Christie and an abiding admiration of Oscar Werner’s talent. But now, suddenly, confronted with friend Angie’s incendiary question, the obstacles were gone. I knew it was time.

What I hadn’t expected, at least not consciously, was the startling knockout timeliness of Fahrenheit 451. This, for example, as Faber, the old professor, reminds Montag, the rebel fireman, how their nightmare state came about:

Remember, the firemen are rarely necessary. The public itself stopped reading of its own accord. You firemen provide a circus now and then at which buildings are set off and crowds gather for the pretty blaze, but it’s a small sideshow indeed, and hardly necessary to keep things in line… People are having fun.”

I remember the newspapers dying like huge moths. No one wanted them back. No one missed them. And then the Government, seeing how advantageous it was to have people reading only about passionate lips and the fist in the stomach, circled the situation with your fire-eaters.

And this:

“So now do you see why books are hated and feared? They show the pores in the face of life. The comfortable people want only wax moon faces, poreless, hairless, expressionless.

I might have gasped, aloud, reading those passages, apprehending their electric immediacy, their awful insidious currency. I gape anew with each reading, yet, though written more than half a century ago! The fateful trend toward passive consumerism and ultimate illiteracy is malignantly alive and thriving. I’m wondering now if my reluctance to read Fahrenheit 451 over the decades since it first appeared was more a response to a chilling subconscious intimation, from its theme alone, that Ray Bradbury had done something much more important than merely write an alarming novel, that he in fact had divined a prophesy.

 Bradbury’s narrative, besides its philosophical insight and lyricism, is what today’s publishing marketers call “a thriller” or “suspense”. Fahrenheit 451 is both. Montag gradually metamorphizes into all-out rebellion, sparked by a teenage neighbor girl whose family has not succumbed to the prevailing herd mentality Faber characterizes as “the most dangerous enemy to truth and freedom, the solid unmoving cattle of the majority. Oh, God, the terrible tyranny of the majority.” The rebel fireman eventually finds himself the object of a nail-biting chase involving swarms of helicopters and a relentless mechanical hound with eight legs, a cruelly efficient computer brain and a retractable needle that injects poison into its captives.

Montag takes up with an underground band of former literature professors who avoid cities and travel by night. They’ve devoted themselves to memorizing great works of literature in the event some day humanity will want to remember its roots. “Some day, some year, the books can be written again,” one of his fellow fugitives tells him, “The people will be called in, one by one, to recite what they know and we’ll set it up in type until another Dark Age, when we might have to do the whole damn thing over again. But that’s the wonderful thing about man; he never gets so discouraged or disgusted that he gives up doing it all over again, because he knows very well it is important and worth the doing.”

So, after finally reading Fahrenheit 451, would I recommend it as “the one book everyone should read at least once?” Well, I’m sure glad I did. Thanks for the prompt, Angie!

[Find more Friday's Forgotten Books links at Todd Mason's amazingly eclectic blog]

THE DIG – Cynan Jones

I might never have read the startlingly good short novel The Dig had a poet friend whose eclectic tastes I respect but don’t always share not recommended it. I still might not have read it had she spoken in the same breath—as well she might have--“Cormac McCarthy”, a name that has irritated me ever since I read enough of Blood Meridian to hear in the author’s self-consciously poetic voice an unmistakable celebration of cynicism that made me want to dash a glass of cheap beer in what I imagined to be his smug face.

It didn’t help to know of his brilliant success, which for me elevates nothing more than my ordinarily healthy blood pressure. Had I a lawn and saw him on it I’d grab my 12-gauge and order him off. But enough of him whom I would name only a pet vulture after. We’re here to talk about The Dig. Despite critics comparing its writing to that of the aforementioned vulture’s namesake, I would read anything Cynan Jones wrote.

This young Welsh author seduced me at The Dig’s get-go. I came near to short-circuiting my laptop with drool (that’s hyperbole, for which I apologize, recognizing the need to calm down a tad before my blog administrator pulls the plug on this report). Jones seduced me even before I reached the following description, which some reviewers cite in their comparison with...the other:

He was a gruff and big man and when he got from the van it lifted and relaxed like a child relieved of the momentary fear of being hit. Where he went he brought a sense of harmfulness and it was as if this was known even by the inanimate things about him. They feared him somehow.

He opened the back of the van and the wire inside the window clattered and he reached for the sack and dropped the badger out. He spat into the dirty tarmac beside it.

The dogs had pulled the front of its face off and its nose hung loose and bloodied, hanging from a sock of skin. It hung off the badger like a separate animal.

Ag, he thought. The crows will sort that.

Were The Dig to continue in this vein, with “the big man” (we’re never given a name) carrying the entire weight in a saga of cruel, earthy brutality, the polite faint praise I’d have felt compelled to offer likely would have strained my friendship with the poet (one avoids outright dishonesty in literary relationships of this nature, and snarling or shouting discourse is unthinkable except perhaps when either or both parties are hearing impaired). It was our good fortune the other weight-bearing character is farmer Daniel, a decent fellow mourning the violent death of his wife, obviating any need to ponder those scenarios.

 

TBM and Daniel live near each other in a rural Welsh community, but they apparently have never met. Yet their lives, different as can be, appear on a collision course. Both men live alone, although Daniel feels a constant presence of the wife he lost recently when a horse kicked her head. TBM makes his living with his dogs, exterminating rats for farmers by day, and, by night, illegally digging up badgers from their burrows to sell to gamblers who pit them against dogs. We find Daniel birthing lambs by hand, an exhausting and occasionally heartbreaking job especially with the ever-present grief for his wife.

Scouting the countryside with his map of badger “setts” (burrows), TBM sees Daniel’s farm as a good prospect for his next dig:

The first sett he had in mind was too close to outbuildings with men and dogs he did not know. This might be the place.

He’s weak, the big man thought. He’s weak and he is a farmer by himself. He will be occupied. News spread out here, soaked out, and he knew about the loss of Daniel’s wife and why he was at the graveyard. He’s trying to get through on his own.

He knew the setts locally and knew that this sett was relatively distant from the house of the farm. It was walkable from his own place. It’s the one, he said to himself. A man on his own, what can he do?

It’s a setup crying out for the Peckinpah treatment: Borgnine as TBM, of course, and Hoffman as Daniel with Eva Marie Saint in the ghostly flashbacks. Alas, Rin Tin Tin and Lassie are obliged to sit this one out.

Facetious again, a tic I’ve acquired to protect my manly cover sometimes in the presence of beauty and elegance. The writing, oh, the writing, the story. The setting. Hemingway came immediately to mind as I marveled at the spare perfection of Jones’s word choices and his pacing and tone. Then I started thinking. Much of Hemingway’s pared-down prose and structure betray a studied dramatic air. In its time, this was new and different and it dazzled. Today it stands out a tad threadbare.

None of that in The Dig. It’s simple reality, stark naked humanity, this alone.

[find more Friday's Forgotten Books links at Todd Mason's amazingly eclectic blog:

http://socialistjazz.blogspot.com/]

ALL DAY AND A NIGHT – Alafair Burke

Alafair Burke had already published a dozen novels before I had any inkling she existed. And when it finally sank in that she did, I put off reading anything she wrote until a couple of days ago. Took me awhile to get used to the idea the Alafair I had watched grow up in her father’s novels wasn’t the same. Even then I no doubt shall always see the real one, the nonfiction daughter of James Lee Burke, through the same Louisiana bayou’s misty glow as Burke’s fictional character, Dave Robicheaux, continues to see his grownup Alafair:

Whenever I looked at Alafair, I saw the little El Salvadoran girl I pulled from a submerged plane that went down in the salt by Southwest Pass. I saw a little girl I called Alf who wore a Donald Duck cap with a quacking bill and a T-shirt with a smiling whale named Baby Orca and tennis shoes embossed with the words LEFT and RIGHT on the respective toes. The image of that little El Salvadoran girl will always hover before me like a hologram.

That’s from Burke’s most recent of his twenty elegant Robicheaux crime novels, published three years ago with the Alafair character a graduate of Stanford Law School and writing her second crime novel. And still instructing her father, as she has from about the midpoint of the series, to stop calling her “Alf”. I’d be willing to bet (were it not illegal, of course) that Alafair Burke, a graduate of Stanford Law School, a former prosecutor and now a law professor in New York City, instructs her father as well to stop calling her “Alf”. Knowing this, and knowing the power of richly imaginative writing and how it can carry you to a magical landscape from which it is hard to take leave, maybe it helps to understand my ambivalence toward venturing from the bayou’s misty glow into another, perhaps more objective light, even and especially one emanating from the same corpuscular soup (despite the myth being more fun, the real Alafair is JLB’s natural daughter). There’s the curiosity and the caution. Ultimately the first prevailed when I decided to read Alafair Burke’s ninth crime/suspense novel, All Day and a Night.

Not her father’s style in any way, but smart and engaging in her own. All Day and a Night is the fifth and most recent in a series starring Ellie Hatcher, a thirty-something (I think—maybe fortyish) New York City homicide detective. She grew up in Wichita, same as Alafair Burke. The plot uses a familiar serial-killer trope but with several clever twists. Hatcher’s boyfriend, an assistant district attorney, arranges for her and her partner to re-investigate the murders of five prostitutes for which a man is already serving life without parole (known in prison parlance as all day and a night).Why the fresh look? Because the victim of a new murder was mutilated in the same way as the others, a way that was never made public, suggesting the real killer is still unknown.

At the same time a ruthless, publicity-hungry defense lawyer lures brilliant young corporate attorney, Carrie Blank, from her prestigious firm to help spring the convict. The attraction for Blank, whose half-sister was one of the victims, is that proving the wrong man was convicted might help lead police to the real killer.

Alafair Burke and her father

Complicated indeed. And it gets more so, much more so, before eventually it all comes together. There’s something of the classic police procedural here as well as edge-of-the-seat suspense. And the writing is deft. So are the main characters. Here’s a taste, right at the start, right after Hatcher has won a bet with her partner, J.J. Rogan, that she’d be the one to finesse a confession out of the woman they were interrogating in the stabbing death of her cheating husband. This is the banter shortly afterward in the squad room between Hatcher, Rogan and another detective:

Rogan was handing Ellie a crisp new set of twenties from his wallet when John Shannon emerged from their lieutenant’s office and witnesses the transaction. “Looks like a nice wad of dough you guys got there.”

Ellie could already see where this was heading. The most effort John Shannon ever put into the squad room was cracking wise. With money changing hands from Rogan to Ellie, his wee brain was probably overheating from the collision of potential barbs: Would it be the attractive female detective earning her money the old-fashioned way, or yet another comment about Rogan’s family wealth? Lucky for Ellie, more often than not Shannon had a way of opening the door for her go-to retort.

“You mean like those wads of dough you snarf down every morning at Krispy Kreme?” She tapped out a “bu-dump bump” on her desktop. “I’m sorry, man. You just make lame cop-eating-doughnut jokes so...damn...easy.”

“When you got it, you flaunt it,” he said, patting his oversized belly. At least the guy had as good a sense of humor about himself as he expected in others.

Ah, dear little Alf, look what you've become.

[for more Friday's Forgotten Books check the links on Patti Abbott's unforgettable blog]