"She had lost weight, and it had been taken from her face. But she had good color, having sunned frequently in the hospital's solarium, and the thinning of her face gave a quality of spirituality to her beauty it had lacked before.
She---
But hold it! Hold it right there!"
(Jim Thompson, The Rip-Off)
It is a book I grabbed off the free shelf at work; sometimes this job is too fab.
La Tenebrous tagged me to post this, but I am not tagging onward because I hardly even know anyone with blogger accounts (or, anyone she hasn't already tagged).
http://tenebrouskate.blogspot.com/
But I am pleased at the serendipity, because I had previously promised Our Tenebrous Empress that I would lend her some Jim Thompson books, and then I went to the dusty milkcrate shelves at home and could not find a single rollicking hardboiled noir paperback. I used to love this stuff (I'm sure I still do), but in 20 years it has somehow all been lent out, given away, lost, stolen, used to stanch the bleeding in unremembered wounds, stashed away on a boat, traded for other books, or consigned to a box in someone else's attic/basement/closet.
I try to resist the free shelves here, because one runs the risk of OD'ing on uncorrected publisher's proofs of crappy new anthologies, alarming memoirs, or analyses of the current situation in one of the places that always has a current situation. But then every once in a while! And on the same day that I got me the Jim T., I also nabbed an Uz Jsme Doma CD.
