Neanderpundit

from my friend John

“me and my cousin went to look for some arrowheads and other indian rocks in a couple places we know by a bluff. We had to hike in a couple hours, and he had this old beagle that he just had to take with him everywhere. Anyway, we packed our stuff in and set up sleeping bags- as the light snow from earlier that day started to melt there were only two places where the water didn’t drip down off that bluff, each just big enough for a sleeping bag. That night it got cold again, enough to need a fire, and all we could find was a sappy old pine knot. We finally got it lit and sat there next to it, black smoke just pouring off that pine knot, and for some reason, the beagle preferred my sleeping bag to my cousin’s.

I showed up at home the next day, blacker than hell from the fire and smelling like a wet dog, and the wife made me wash off in the garage before she’d let me in the house.

Can’t say I blame her.”

I couldn’t make anything up that good.

Again, rarely does a totally unknown (well, to me) author come along and give me such pause.

I like the book, the wife has now read Black Echo, and she concurs. The bottomline, is, Harry Bosch is a Man. No, not a metrosexual sensitive alan alda type, but a Man. The book is full of Harry being a Man. He tags a coroner in his stilt home on a mountainside, and as she’s showering him out of her, he rolls over and telephones a newspaper reporter with something she told him more or less in the throes of passion. He crosses the border into mexico, armed, prepared to take on the mexican mafia. He pulls the trigger on a colleague, because it is the right thing to do at the time. He leaves a body to decompose, unfound, in a remote location because no other solution will do.

I like men who do what must be done and to hell with the consequences. I’ve known men like that. My father was a man like that. Men who wear Old Spice and shave with straight razors, or big double edged adjustables that use the same blades you use to scrape the paint off the windows. Harry Bosch is that kind of man, and the kind of gritty world he lives in is nice to peer into and see how things were when men wore hats, and women had curves. Unfortunately for Harry these stories are set in the late 90’s so he is an anachronisim. And he makes it look easy and clean, and you wish you were him. Well, I do. Read the book, you’ll like it.

I spend more time removing spam than I do writing here. maybe I should let a guest spammer write a post once in a while.

Ok, not such a good idea.