Perelman
comes to
the rescue
TIME hangs heavy in this enforced self-isolation. No sport, no pubs, no Cossack dancing on the bar counter in the Duikers' Club.
But there are some plusses. I find myself re-reading American short story writer SJ Perelman. There are some delightful passages which I will share.
This yarn, Farewell, My Lovely Appetiser, concerns a New York private detective, Mike Noonan, who is hired by a stunningly beautiful Swedish lady to discover how a delicatessen called Smorgasbits produces pieces of herring of pinkish tone. These upset her husband, who suspects he is being poisoned for his insurance money.
Mike Noonan sets out on the case. Note the authentic crimewriter's style.
"Then I slipped a pint of rye into my stomach and a heater into my kick and went looking for a bookdealer named Lloyd Thursday ...
"The thin galoot outside Gristede's had taken a powder when I got there, that meant we were no longer playing girls' rules. I hired a hack to Wanamaker's, cut over to Third, walked up toward Fourteenth. At Twelfth a mink-faced jasper made up as a street cleaner tailed me for a block …At Thirteenth somebody dropped a sour tomato out of a third-storey window, missing me by inches. I doubled back to Wanamaker's, hopped a bus up Fifth to Madison Square, and switched to a cab down Fourth, where the secondhand bookshops elbow each other like dirty urchins …"
Marvellous stuff! That's the way to throw 'em off your tail.
Then denouement. The Swedish lady turns out the baddy. In fact she's got her ice blue automatic trained on Noonan.
"'Reach for the stratosphere, gumshoe.' Sigrid Bjornsterne's voice was colder than Horace Greeley and Little Farvel put together, but her clothes were plenty calorific. She wore a forest-green suit of Hockanum woollens, a Knox Wayfarer and baby crocodile pumps. It was her blouse, though, that made the tiny red hairs stand up on my knuckles. Its deep yoke folds, shoulder pads and shirtband bow could only have been designed by some master craftsman, some Cezanne of the shears.
"'Well, Nosy Parker,' she sneered, 'so you found out how they tinted the herring.'
"'Sure – grenadine,' I said easily. 'You knew it all along. And you planned to add a few grains of oxylbutane-cheriphosphate, which turns the same shade of pink in solution, to your husband's portion, knowing it wouldn't show in the post-mortem. Then you'd collect the three hundred Gs …'"
And then – "I snaked the rug out from under her feet and she went down in a swirl of silken ankles. The bullet whined past me into the ceiling as I vaulted over the desk and pinioned her against the wardrobe …
"For an hour after they took her away I sat alone in the taupe-coloured dusk, watching lights come on and a woman in the hotel opposite adjusting a garter. Then I treated my tonsils to five fingers of firewater, jammed on my hat … and went out into the rain."
Wonderful stuff! Yes, this coronavirus has turned our world upside down. It's scary. Self-isolation is lonesome and unnatural. But it did at least reintroduce me to SJ Perelman.
Tailpiece
THEY said all I needed to go to the shops was a mask and gloves. But when I got there other people had clothes on also.
Last word
It is well to remember that the entire universe, with one trifling exception, is composed of others.
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