On the second page of John Dickson Carr’s first murder mystery It Walks by Night, the book’s narrator, a young American named Jeff Marle, tells the reader that, on that first night, “I knew that there would be ugly things in the future.” Carr, an...
Halfway through Elmore Leonard’s 1972 novel Forty Lashes Less One, Everett Manly, the fill-in warden at Yuma Territorial Prison in Arizona is trying to get two convicts to find some purpose in life. One is Harold Jackson, a black former Marine...
Back in high school, two years in a row, we had a retreat master who relished the session he did on death. “You will die,” he’d intone in a very theatrical way that was meant to scare the bejesus out of us, teens that we were. It was part...
vigilante big flake snow covered the grave and the body they had left in their haste and the strawberry vine grew up from his heart over his neck and into his eyes entwining his ankles and forearms and winter sparrows flew down to wonder at the...
It’s not for nothing that the front cover of The Book of Genesis, illustrated by R. Crumb carries this warning: ADULT SUPERVISION RECOMMENDED FOR MINORS And this note: THE FIRST BOOK OF THE BIBLE GRAPHICALLY DEPICTED! NOTHING LEFT OUT! The...
I’m at a loss about the newly published Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland by Patrick Radden Keefe. As a reader, I find that, sometimes, books just hit me the wrong way. I think everyone who reads has this...
By Patrick T. Reardon This essay was originally posted on the 5th anniversary of my lay-off, April 23, 2014. Aside from adjusting the first sentence, I haven’t changed it. Ten years ago this month, I was laid off by the Chicago...
The video of me playing basketball didn’t exactly go viral, but it did cause a bit of a stir among my Facebook friends. And, later, it got me wondering about basketball and spirituality. It was during our usual Sunday afternoon pick-up game at...
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