We went over to a Japanese place on fifty-eighth street for dinner and then I let Nora talk me into going to the Edges' after all. Halsey Edge was a tall scrawny man of fifty-something with a pinched yellow face and no hair at all. He called himself "a ghoul by profession and inclination" - his only joke, if that is what it was- by which he meant he was an archeologist, and he was very proud of his collection of battle axes. He was not so bad once you resigned yourself to the fact that you were in for occasional cataloguings of his armory - stone axes, copper axes, bronze axes, doubled-bladed axes, faceted axes, polygonal axes, scalloped axes, hammer axes, adze axes, Mesopotamian axes, Hungarian axes, Nordic axes, and all of them looking pretty moth-eaten. (p108)Almost done with 'The Thin Man.' The above-quote was the part where Hammett crawled in my brain and and tickled a literary pleasure center. Double-plus? Myself and the unconquerable C. Collision will be book-clubbing Hammett's 'Red Harvest'! A co-worker told me you couldn't book-club with just two people. Puh-shaw, I say!
Pic: offa Flickr.
