A Quick Note About Some Hardboiled Tales

Patricia Highsmith's Slowly, Slowly, In the Wind whisks along, covering years in a paragraph. Just enough detail is given for the reader to understand the stories protagonist is angry, petty, and vindictive. Everything spills out from there. Sparse prose hurls the story forward, and the general thrust of its direction is clearly signposted. However,  Highsmith nicely slows the narrative down just enough to highlight the malignant nature of her protagonist when he relishes knowing his enemy is swinging "slowly, slowly in the wind" where he can see.

Unlike the former, Running Out of Dog, by Dennis Lehane, takes it time to get where it's going. Characters have time to develop personalities and complex motivations. Lehane, unlike Highsmith, also gives the reader a reason to care about the outcome. Which, like all noir, is the type of outcome that sticks it in and breaks it off.

Taking place over the course of a Summer, and in many ways, the lifetimes, of the denizens of a small South Carolina off highway town on the way to nowhere. Lehane laces in the background of Vietnam, later mid-century economic dislocation, and childhood trauma, to flesh out and give weight to the violence that centers and imbues every line of the story. The narrative begins with the mayor offers a bounty to Elgin and Blue to shoot and kill the stray dogs that wander onto the highway and inevitably get hit by tourists driving through. Elgin, a veteran just back from Vietnam, who grew up on the wrong side of the tracks with Blue, knows what a bad idea this really is. The story expands to include Jewel, Elgin and Blue's other childhood friend who is too deeply entangled with both, while also looking for any way to the other side of the tracks. It does not take long to realize what Elgin realized from the beginning. Nothing good is likely to happen when you do run out of dog.