VANISHING LADIES (28 march 2007)
These days it's getting harder and harder for me to find good books to read.
When I like a writer's style, I want to read about everything he has written. With George Orwell, that was bad luck: you can read all the novels Orwell ever wrote in less than a month.
Ed McBain was more generous. He must have written about a hundred novels. Even when he was very ill, he wrote his superb novel Fiddlers.
Recently I was lucky and found an early McBain novel, which I hadn't read before: Vanishing Ladies.
Just to give you an impression of the way in which McBain manages to describe a ferocious blow on the head in an interesting way:
In books, in the movies, you get hit on the head with a wrench and you go unconscious and when you wake up, you feel a little dizzy. Otherwise, you're fine. You just missed a little bit of the action, but everybody is in a big hurry to fill you in.
I would like to correct this false impression.
The skull, even if it is a hard one like mine, is a pretty vulnerable thing. If you get hit with a wrench, or a bottle, or a hammer, or a chair, or a club, or a shoe, or whatever, you don't just drift off into a peaceful sleep. Bang your head sometime by accident and see how quickly the bump rises. Then add the force of a man's arm and shoulder to the blow, add the terible impact of piece of forged steel.
Your head cracks.
The hair cushions the blow only slightly, and the the steel splits the skin and opens your skull, and if you're lucky you don't suffer a brain concussion. If you're lucky, you bleed. Your head aches, and you bleed. You bleed down the side of your face, and under your shirt collar. There is a hole in your head, and your blood runs out of it, and when you finally come to, the blood is caked and dried on your temple and your cheek and your neck.
You squint up at the light, and you feel only a terrible pain somewhere at the top of your head. You can't even localize the pain, because your whole head seems to be in a vise, your whole head is pounding and throbbing. This is the hangover supreme. This is the prince of all hangovers, and you don't laugh it off and drink a glass of tomato juice. There's nothing to laugh about. You've been hit on the head, and the chair didn't shatter the way it does in the movies -- but your head did.
This is the kind of description that McBain is a master at: it conveys the extreme violence of a blow on the head and is witty and original at the same time.
This is the kind of forceful prose I like reading. Can you imagine I miss Ed McBain. And then I'm only a reader ...
