BRIEF THOUGHTS

by Steve Steinbock

This week’s Bandersnatches may come off as more random than most (and I know that’s saying a lot). I began thinking about the week’s column, not having much of anything to say, and now I find myself surrounded by ideas and not sure where to begin.

I suppose I’ll start at the point where I ended last week. When I mentioned Dick Stodghill in my final paragraph, I had no idea that we’d be losing him two days later. I never met Dick in person, but he was a friend to all of us here through his frequent comments, through his guest column on Criminal Brief, and more importantly through his stories in Hitchcock and elsewhere. Last month Doug Greene and I had lunch with Hitchcock editor Linda Landrigan and Queen editor Janet Hutchings. At one point during the lunch I mentioned Dick, and all three of my companions sat back, smiled, and sighed.

Everyone liked Dick. He will be missed.

Random Droppings

Anyone notice how the word random has worked its way into youth slang? I often hear my kids say, “That’s random,” in response to anything they find off the wall. Occasionally the usage morphs into something more derogatory. In situations where my generation would have said, “That’s stupid,” kids now will sometimes say, “That’s random.” I find this unfortunate, and wonder how it came about. My guess is that in part, the word “stupid” has – perhaps rightfully – joined the ranks of politically incorrect hate-speech, not tolerated by parents or teachers. Kids may be using “random” the same way Hammett used “gunsel” – to get their idea past the censors. But in part, and on a darker note, I wonder if children of the early 21st century see randomness as inherently bad – or stupid. This would surprise me. But if so, I think they’re missing something.

Room for Thought

There’s a place I’ve visited a number of times in my dreams. It’s a room in my grandparents’ house, a big room in the basement that I enter through a door off the side of the laundry room. There are countertops running the length of the large room, and a huge table fills the center. Every surface is covered with books, magazines, photo albums, and memorabilia.

To the best of my knowledge, the room never existed. But for thirty or forty years, I’ve found myself there in my dreams, sorting through the papers, finding a random article or photograph. Jungians may have a heyday unwrapping this image. Maybe it means I have some unfulfilled need or aspiration. But to me it’s just a nice place that my dreams take me to now and then.

In a real sense, my office has become that place. My office, the attic level on our house is my territory – eight-hundred square feet filled with bookshelves, desks, boxes, and stacks of books and papers. In stark contrast to the rest of our orderly house, there are times when it’s difficult to find a footpath from one end of the attic to the other. At times the clutter overwhelming – even for me – and it becomes impossible to work there. But at other times, like the room in my dreams, it’s a refuge and repository of comfort and random ideas.

So Many Books

I’m always surrounded by books. But this week in particular I have more than usual. Plus, I’ve just ordered two of Dick Stodghill’s collections. Yesterday I finished the novel I was reading, and in trying to decide what to read next, books started flying at me like playing cards at the end of a Lewis Carroll novel. I ended up with a stack of some twenty books. Other than one memoir (by Paul Auster) and collection of essays (by P.D. James), all the books I’d chosen are more or less part of The Genre. Some are more recent than others. A few are review copies that have yet to be published.

Four of the books – a disproportionate number – are what I suppose you might call, for lack of a better term, meta-detective stories. They are either metaphysical detective stories, or meta-fictional novels with detectives. All four of these floated to the top of my stack. They include Noir by Robert Coover (to be published by Overlook next April), an adventure of Philip M. Noir, told in the second-person; Richard Doetsch’s The 13th Hour, a novel told backwards, from chapter 12 through chapter 1, as the hero jumps back in time an hour at a jump in order to solve a murder for which he stands accused; and Jedidiah Berry’s The Manual for Detection, a Borges-esque tale of a reluctant private eye searching for meaning and for his boss in a rainy city.

The fourth is Paul Auster’s City of Glass, and that’s the one I decided to read. I would tell you about it, but I’d rather finish this column so I can read some more. Meanwhile, let me hear your random thoughts.

Come back next week and together we’ll jump down the rabbit hole or leap through a looking glass, take a stroll through an Argentine labyrinth, or dive into the depths with Poe and Melville.