FIRST IMPRESSION

by Rob Lopresti

Steve D. Rogers did a wonderful job last week analyzing the opening of one of his short stories and that reminded me that I had been thinking about doing a similar job on a short story I read recently. So, here goes.

Sam Geddes placed the faded “Clerk Wanted, Inquire Within” sign in his liquor store window at just about the usual five-month rotation. Fifteen minutes later Coleman strolled in wearing a navy watch cap and an army field jacket with an 82nd Infantry patch on the right sleeve. A faded, inverted V on the opposite sleeve outlined the site where sergeant’s stripes had been. The name COLEMAN jumped out from above the jacket’s torn right front pocket. Coleman’s face was plain and impassive, but his dark green eyes — eyes that locked in on you and never moved — were like heat-seeking missiles.

That’s the first paragraph of “Revision,” by Robert Greer. I read it in The Mysterious Press Anniversary Anthology, which was published in 2001, but I just got around to it. So I’m slow, sue me.

I like the paragraph a lot. It does the one thing a story start absolutely needs to do: make me want to find out what happens.

But what else does it do?

Well, let’s see. We know that Sam Geddes owns a not very successful liquor store (the sign is faded, and the help doesn’t last). He’s been in business for a while (again, faded). He’s a bit fatalistic (still using the recruitment method that doesn’t seem to work too well).

Then the focus switches to Coleman. He’s decisive, impetuous, or desperate (fifteen minutes after the sign goes up, there he is), maybe all three. He’s a veteran. He has some strong abilities and some serious issues (he made it to sergeant, and lost the rank).

I don’t like the last half of the last sentence. We are suddenly in subjective territory: the narrator’s missile metaphor is feeding us opinions. I liked it better when he seemed to be giving us just the facts.

So, where do you think this story is going to go? It’s likely that Geddes will be our surrogate; learning about Coleman so that we can too. My guess would be that Coleman will turn out to be the main character, but we don’t know yet whether he’s a violent man who will cause trouble, or a troubled man who will redeem himself. (Although the title may be a hint.)

Celebrating 25 years

As you no doubt figured out this book contains short stories by some of Mysterious Press’s authors to celebrate the 25th anniversary of the first all-mystery publisher. Many of the stories, logically enough, have an anniversary theme.

Donald E. Westlake’s “Come Again?” features the tabloid reporter “odious Boy Cartwright” investigating a lady preacher who has prophesied that she will return to life on the anniversary of her murder. The preacher’s small southern home town doesn’t quite know what to make of Cartwright.

“You’re a foreigner,” the lad in the oversize raspberry jacket with the motel chain’s logo on its lapel told him, and pointed at Boy as though Boy didn’t already know where he was. “You’re French!”

“Got it in one, dear,” Boy agreed. “Just winged in from jolly old Paris to observe the festivities.”

William Marshall, in the only short story I have ever seen by him, has one of his Hong Kong cops dealing with an infestation of giant ants on the anniversary of becoming a detective. (If that sounds crazy, “THEM!” is relatively sane compared to some of Marshall’s wonderful Yellowthread Street novels.)

But the best story is “The Favorite Table,” by Peter Lovesey. Lovesey writes wonderful short stories and this one is about a loathsome couple that inconveniences a fancy restaurant in order to celebrate a possibly sinister anniversary. Only in the last paragraph does the author reveal, with seeming casualness, what was really going on, and even then you have to figure out for yourself. Extremely clever.

We started out talking about first paragraphs but now we are discussing a last paragraph. And when you get to the last paragraph it’s probably time to stop.