Jim Thompson's take on Agatha Christie; plus Willeford and Schow

1) Is The Kill-Off Jim Thompson's version of an English village mystery: Get a bunch of warped characters together in a small town, let each tell his or her own story, and let the reader figure out which of the suspects is likeliest to have killed the local gossip?

2) Funniest bit so far in Charles Willeford's The Way We Die Now:

"There were two bologna sandwiches wrapped in oil paper and two hard-boiled eggs in the sack. [Tiny Bock] unwrapped one of the sandwiches, noticed that the lunch meat had turned green on the outer edge. He rewrapped the sandwich, put it back in the sack, took one of the hard-boiled eggs."

followed a couple of pages later by:

"Bock folded the bills and put them into his back pocket. `There’s a couple of bologna sandwiches left in the sack if you want ’em.'”

3) Early chapters of David J. Schow's Gun Work (2008) suggest he's a pretty good successor to the hard-boiled writers of the past.

© Peter Rozovsky 2013