Lionel White - The Snatchers/Clean Break (The Killing)

I have already written about Lionel White and his crime-caper novels, and this Stark House double-bill edition, featuring an excellent introduction by Rick Ollerman, is a very worthwhile volume. The Snatchers, White’s debut novel, foreshadows the formula he would perfect in his later work. Although the story of the kidnapping of a young child has a few shortcomings, it remains engaging, particularly because of the memorable seaside hideout. The novel was later adapted into the film Night of the Following Day, starring Marlon Brando. The second novel in this volume, Clean Break, is even stronger. Reading it, I was frequently reminded of Kubrick’s adaptation, The Killing, although the novel possesses a somewhat different tone and pace, as well as several significant scenes and plot details that were omitted from the film. All in all, this is a very enjoyable summer read.

Film Noir Reader -ed. Alain Silver & James Ursini

Film noir remains an inexhaustible subject for study and rediscovery, as demonstrated by the first volume of the four-part Film Noir Reader, edited by Alain Silver and James Ursini. The book is divided into three sections and contains a number of engaging essays that reveal the evolution of critical thought on noir from the 1970s through the 1990s. Among my favorites are Paul Schrader’s celebrated “Notes on Film Noir,” Paul Kerr’s “Out of What Past? Notes on the B Film Noir,” Tony Williams’s “Phantom Lady, Cornell Woolrich and the Masochistic Aesthetic,” which discusses one of my favorite writers and his screen adaptations, Alain Silver and James Ursini’s “John Farrow: Anonymous Noir,” devoted in part to The Big Clock and my personal favorite, Night Has a Thousand Eyes, Robert E. Smith’s “Mann in the Dark: The Film Noirs of Anthony Mann,” and the essay on neo-noir, “Kill Me Again: Movement Becomes Genre.” Together these pieces show why film noir continues to inspire fresh interpretations and passionate debate. Something I would criticize is thick font and low quality reproductions of stills.

Nightfall (1956)

Jacques Tourneur, renowned for films such as Cat People and Out of the Past, crafted this small noir gem from David Goodis’s novel of the same name. Although the novel is set in summer, Tourneur transferred the action to a wintry landscape without sacrificing the unmistakable Goodis spirit, which he captures brilliantly through his assured direction. Aldo Ray is excellent as a man ensnared by a chain of unfortunate circumstances, though his ruggedly masculine presence differs somewhat from the protagonists one usually encounters in Goodis’s fiction. The criminals pursuing him are memorable, and Anne Bancroft is equally impressive as his companion, bringing warmth and charm to the role.

Maurizio Ascari - A Counter-History Of Crime Fiction

As a child, I was a great fan of the comics Dylan Dog, Marty Mystère, and Nick Raider. While Dylan Dog investigated nightmares and often blended horror with crime stories, Marty Mystère dealt with the fantastic in its broadest sense, and Nick Raider represented the classic police detective. Later, I discovered horror literature, and writers such as Edgar Allan Poe and H. P. Lovecraft became some of my favorites.

For that reason, I was immediately drawn to Maurizio Ascari's A Counter-History of Crime Fiction, published in the respected Crime Files series. Ascari argues that crime fiction did not emerge suddenly or in isolation, but developed out of a variety of earlier traditions, including medieval concepts of crime and punishment, Gothic literature, sensationalism, melodrama, Victorian spiritualism, mesmerism, and other cultural and literary influences that predated the modern detective story.

I found the sections on Cesare Lombroso's theories of the "born criminal" and the influence of Max Nordau's Degeneration particularly fascinating, as they demonstrate how nineteenth-century scientific and pseudo-scientific ideas shaped literary representations of criminals and criminal investigation.

While reading Ascari, I was frequently reminded of the film Angel Heart, which brilliantly combines horror and the hard-boiled tradition, as well as the comic Dylan Dog, whose stories often demonstrate that the boundary between horror and crime fiction is far less rigid than it might initially appear.

A Counter-History of Crime Fiction is not a conventional history of the detective novel. Instead, it serves as a reminder that crime fiction emerged from a complex mixture of literary and cultural traditions, and that this is precisely what makes the genre far richer and more diverse than is often assumed.

Giorgio Scerbanenco - Betrayal

cover photograph of original novel in italian

Italy never developed a crime fiction tradition as extensive as those of Britain or the United States. However, the famous Il Giallo Mondadori series, which introduced Italian readers to translated British and American detective novels, helped pave the way for the emergence of a distinctly Italian crime fiction tradition.

One of its most important figures is Giorgio Scerbanenco, often regarded as the godfather of Italian crime fiction. Betrayal is among his best-known novels. It begins with Dr. Duca Lamberti agreeing to perform an operation on a young woman who wants to regain her virginity. After the procedure, he learns that she has been murdered, drawing him into a world of violence, organized crime, drugs, and the lingering shadows of Italy's Fascist past.

Although Scerbanenco employs the conventions of crime fiction, Betrayal often feels closer to the broader Italian literary tradition than to the Anglo-American detective novel. While reading it, I was reminded of writers such as Leonardo Sciascia, Dino Buzzati, Luigi Pirandello, Italo Calvino, Alberto Moravia and even Gabriele D'Annunzio. The novel uses crime not merely as a puzzle to be solved but as a way of exploring history, betrayal, and the moral fractures of postwar Italian society.

The English translation occasionally feels a little stiff, but it remains perfectly readable and does not diminish the power of Scerbanenco's vision.

George Simenon - Mr Hire's Engagement

I greatly enjoyed the film Monsieur Hire (1989), which was based on this novel. While browsing for other books, I happened to come across the Penguin edition, featuring a striking black-and-white photograph of a woman seen from behind, standing in front of a window. Although the film differs from the novel in several respects, Simenon manages, in just 150 pages, to create a remarkably convincing noirish world of alienation and loneliness.

The protagonist, Monsieur Hire, appears somewhat strange and withdrawn, which leads the police, his neighbours, and the local community to suspect him of murdering a prostitute. Yet Simenon is far less interested in revealing either the killer or the victim than in exploring the psychology of an isolated individual. The murder mystery remains in the background, while the novel focuses on an understated portrait of existential anxiety.

Hire is a timid, frustrated, and profoundly lonely man, but at the same time he longs for love, even as he fears it. One of the most memorable moments comes near the end of the novel, when a fireman remarks, "He died of a stroke, as if he had been frightened." In a way, that single sentence seems to summarize Hire's entire existence—a man whose life has been shaped by fear.

The novel reminded me of The Lodger by Marie Belloc Lowndes, In a Lonely Place by Dorothy B. Hughes, and The Tenant by Roland Topor, as all four works explore, in different ways, loneliness, alienation, and the suspicion that society directs toward those who fail to fit in.

Savage Art : A Biography Of Jim Thompson - Robert Polito

When I finished reading this biography, I felt a sense of sadness during its final pages, as Jim Thompson struggled with illness and a series of strokes. Reading Savage Art felt like following the entire epic of one man's life and his relentless passion for writing.

I must admit that the opening chapters were a little slow for me, with their detailed account of Thompson's ancestors. However, once the book moved beyond that, I came to know not only the ultimate noir writer, but also the man behind the novels: a caring father, a devoted husband, an introvert, and, sadly, a heavy drinker.

One of the most fascinating aspects of the biography is that, by learning about Thompson, I also learned about America during his lifetime. Before becoming one of the greatest crime novelists, he worked as a true crime reporter, an oil field journalist, a bellboy—where he encountered many of the criminal types that later populated his fiction—a hobo, and many other odd jobs. His complicated love-hate relationship with his father is another compelling thread running throughout the book.

For me, the biography truly comes alive once Thompson begins writing for Lion Books. As Robert Polito explains, his finest novels can be divided into two broad groups: the first-person psychopathic narratives such as The Killer Inside Me, Savage Night, A Hell of a Woman, Pop. 1280, and The Nothing Man; and the omniscient, multiple-perspective novels such as The Kill-Off and Nothing More Than Murder. I also enjoyed reading about Thompson's collaboration with Stanley Kubrick on the adaptation of Lionel White's Clean Break (The Killing), his frustrating experiences in Hollywood, and the sadness of seeing such an original writer receive so little recognition during his lifetime.

Fortunately, that story has a happier ending. Roughly a decade after his death, Thompson's novels began to be rediscovered. They were republished by the cult Black Lizard imprint, while French films such as Série noire and Coup de Torchon helped introduce his work to a wider audience. Thompson eventually became the celebrated noir writer he had always deserved to be.

Finally, I should mention the edition itself. Serpent's Tail has done an excellent job producing this biography. I especially liked its distinctive smell, which reminded me of the old comic books I owned as a child, as well as the generous selection of photographs that accompany the text.

Jim Thompson - The Kill-Off

As in many of Jim Thompson's novels, The Kill-Off focuses on lost and morally compromised people. The novel follows a woman who believes that her neighbors want to kill her and take her money. However, Thompson does not present his protagonist as an innocent victim. She is a gossip who constantly spreads rumors about the residents of her small town, and the reader soon realizes that some of her neighbors may indeed have reasons to dislike her. At the same time, the other townspeople are hardly portrayed as honest or admirable individuals. Thompson creates a world in which it is difficult to find anyone completely innocent, and where the line between victim and culprit becomes increasingly blurred.

Likewise, as in many of Thompson's other novels, The Kill-Off contains autobiographical elements and appears to be fueled by the author's resentment toward certain people around him. Thompson often worked through his personal frustrations and conflicts in his fiction. As Robert Polito points out in his biography Savage Art, and as Arnold Hano, Thompson's editor at Lion Books, once observed, Thompson had a tendency to work out his problems in his novels.

Ted Lewis - Jack's Return Home (Get Carter)

English gangster stories are well known, from modern works such as Gangs of London to Gerald Kersh's Night and the City. However, Ted Lewis's Jack's Return Home, later adapted into the film Get Carter, stands as one of the most important British gangster noir novels.

The novel features one of the most striking openings in crime fiction. Jack Carter returns to his hometown following the death of his brother Frank, and this homecoming immediately triggers a flood of childhood memories. The motif of arriving in a town is hardly new, but Lewis employs it with remarkable skill. The first-person narration feels authentic and convincing, giving the reader the sense of rediscovering the town and its inhabitants alongside Carter.

The entire novel unfolds at a slow-burn pace. Gangster violence, threats, and confrontations alternate with recollections of Carter's childhood, memories of his brother, and almost poetic observations of everyday life in northern England. The past constantly intrudes upon the present, giving the novel a melancholy quality that distinguishes it from many American hard-boiled crime novels.

Lewis also makes effective use of retardation, or the deliberate postponement of narrative resolution. The mystery surrounding Frank's murder is not revealed all at once but gradually unfolds through a series of encounters, conversations, and conflicts. Foreshadowing is present throughout, creating an atmosphere in which the reader senses from the very beginning that something dangerous lurks beneath the surface of every exchange.

Particularly impressive is the novel's depiction of English social deprivation. Industrial towns, alcohol, crime, and a pervasive sense of social decline are not merely a backdrop but an integral part of the story itself. The characters are not simple gangster-fiction stereotypes; they possess their own histories, flaws, and motivations, making them feel fully human.

Jack's Return Home is more than a story of crime and revenge. It is a novel about returning to the past, about a town that shapes its inhabitants, and about a man who, in his search for the truth behind his brother's death, sinks ever deeper into a world he once tried to escape.

James Naremore - More Than Night : Film Noir In Its Contexts

There are so many books about noir today that reading some of them can become almost tedious. Many authors try to provide a definitive definition of noir, but the more definitions one reads, the more elusive the term becomes. Is noir a mood? Is it a cycle of crime films influenced by German Expressionism and French Poetic Realism? Is it the story of a lost protagonist, a man seduced by a femme fatale? Or is noir simply a brand name, a marketable label that has come to be applied to almost everything?

This is precisely why James Naremore's More Than Night: Film Noir in Its Contexts feels so refreshing. Naremore largely avoids offering a single, definitive definition of noir. Instead, he examines how the concept emerged, how it evolved, and how different generations of critics, filmmakers, and audiences have understood it.

The strongest part of the book is its first half. Here Naremore discusses the origins of noir, its artistic influences, and its key figures. Particularly fascinating are the chapters devoted to B noirs, John Alton and his classic book Painting with Light, as well as the discussions of directors such as Anthony Mann and films like T-Men and He Walked by Night. Alongside film history, Naremore also explores the literary roots of noir through the works of Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, Graham Greene, and James M. Cain.

Naremore also pays attention to the critics and theorists who helped shape the modern understanding of noir. Among them, a special place belongs to Paul Schrader and his influential essay Notes on Film Noir, which for decades served as a starting point for many discussions of the subject. Naremore often agrees with earlier writers, but at the same time he questions their assumptions and demonstrates how difficult it is to reduce noir to a single definition or a fixed set of characteristics.

The book also examines the political context surrounding noir, especially the anti-communist witch hunts in America, as well as the later development of post-noir and neo-noir cinema. Naremore is, in my opinion, at his best when discussing the history and ideas of noir. He is less engaging when he provides detailed plot summaries or close analyses of individual scenes.

Nevertheless, despite occasional digressions, More Than Night remains one of the best books on noir that I have read. Rather than attempting to settle the debate over what noir is, Naremore demonstrates why that debate has continued for decades.

Jonathan Latimer - Headed For A Hearse

I first discovered Jonathan Latimer in Julian Symons's Bloody Murder, where one of his novels was described as unusually explicit for its time. I believe the book in question was Lady in the Morgue. This sparked my interest, and I began looking into Latimer's life and work.

Before becoming a well-known novelist, Latimer worked as a crime reporter and became acquainted with gangsters such as Al Capone and Bugs Moran. He later went on to write screenplays for classic noir films including The Glass Key, The Big Clock, and Night Has a Thousand Eyes.

For that reason, I decided to buy Headed for a Hearse. It turned out to be a solid crime novel that successfully combines elements of the hard-boiled tradition, the English detective story, the locked-room mystery, and screwball comedy. It may not be a forgotten classic, but it is certainly a book worth reading.

Bill Crane is an engaging and witty detective, and the plot unfolds like a ticking time bomb. A wealthy man has been convicted of murdering his wife and has only seven days left before his execution. In a desperate attempt to save his life, he hires the expensive attorney Fickenstein, setting in motion an investigation filled with twists, humor, and unusual situations.

Nikolai Gogol - Dead Souls

 

Nikolai Gogol was a genius of Russian literature, perhaps best known for his unfinished masterpiece (or “poem,” as he called it) Dead Souls.

In it, he uses a technique known as ostranenie (defamiliarization) to make people and events appear strange and unfamiliar, introducing Chichikov, a man who wants to buy dead souls and trade them. This leads to absurd situations, but also occasional tragic moments.

Although the novel is dense and often moves in different directions, it contains purely poetic and philosophical passages that run through the work.

The trade in dead souls can be interpreted in several ways: as a depiction of bureaucratic hell, as a metaphysical descent into the depths of the human soul, or as an absurd social satire.

Although Gogol was respected in his time, even by the Russian emperor, some parts of the work were censored, and others were later shortened or discarded by Gogol himself. Because of this, especially in the later sections, the text feels somewhat uneven and strangely fragmented.

The Routledge Companion To Crime Fiction

This extensive study of around 400 pages in large format is intended for scholars of crime fiction, and it is often quite dry and demanding to read. It takes a transnational approach and looks more toward the future than the past, which is not necessarily my personal preference, but it is still interesting reading. This is especially true when it cites passages from other studies such as John Scaggs’ Crime Fiction, Heather Worthington’s Key Concepts in Crime Fiction, Maurizio Ascari’s A Counter-History of Crime Fiction, and Dennis Porter’s The Pursuit of Crime.

The chapter on crime fiction and graphic novels was somewhat disappointing, as I expected it to present comics such as Alack Sinner and Sam Pezzo. The chapters that suited me best were Genre, Crime Histories and Prehistories, Crime Fiction in the Marketplace, and perhaps also Plotting and Clues, maybe because they deal precisely with what a crime fiction study should focus on: criminal fiction itself.

Philip Larkin: Everyday Life Without Illusions

 

At first glance, Philip Larkin’s poetry appears simple, almost modest. There are no grand myths, no dramatic twists, no “big themes” in the usual sense. Yet it is precisely in this simplicity that its strength lies: Larkin writes about what is most ordinary, and what is rarely observed with honesty.

In his poems, everyday life is not idealized. Love is not a promise of salvation, but often something limited, uncertain, or missed. Time does not bring wisdom, but rather a sense of loss and of something that could have been but never happened. Even ordinary scenes—flats, trains, streets, hospitals—carry within them a quiet weight of transience.

What sets Larkin apart is his ability to avoid illusion. He does not try to convince the reader that life has a hidden, elevated meaning. Instead, he shows it as it is: limited, often monotonous, but precisely for that reason real.

There is a particular honesty in this. His poetry does not seek to “lift” the reader, but to make them recognize what they already know, even if they may not want to see it. Because of this, his poems often leave a sense of quiet discomfort, but also a strange clarity.

Interestingly, Larkin can also be read outside the framework of poetry alone. His worldview carries something reminiscent of the atmosphere of noir fiction: a lack of illusion, a sense of constrained choices, and the quiet melancholy of everyday life. As in good crime fiction, there is no false consolation—only confrontation with reality, without excess explanation.

Perhaps this is why Larkin remains relevant today. In a world that often insists on optimism and spectacle, his poetry reminds us of something more modest but more enduring: that life mostly happens in ordinary moments, between expectations and what actually occurs.

And in that, paradoxically, there is a particular kind of beauty—not as comfort, but as recognition.

Charles Baudelaire

Charles Baudelaire remains one of the defining figures of modern literature, so influential that for decades writers across europe were casually described as “baudelairean” whenever their work contained decadence, melancholy, eroticism or fascination with urban corruption.

His collection les fleurs du mal transformed poetry into something darker and more psychologically unsettling, mixing beauty with decay, sensuality with death and spiritual longing with degradation. Unlike romantic idealists before him, Baudelaire seemed fascinated by evil, boredom and sickness of modern city life.

Baudelaire also played crucial role in introducing Edgar Allan Poe to european readers, translating his stories and poems into french with extraordinary devotion. In many ways, Baudelaire recognized in Poe another doomed artist obsessed with madness, beauty and death. Through these translations poe gained enormous influence on european symbolism and decadent literature.

His own life was marked by debt, scandal and drug addiction, experiences reflected in his essay artificial paradises, meditation on hashish, opium and human desire to escape ordinary consciousness. Despite his self-destructive tendencies, Baudelaire’s influence on modern poetry, symbolism and dark aesthetics remains immense.

Alexander Pushkin

Alexander Pushkin remains central figure of russian literature not only because of his influence but because of the strange myth surrounding his life. Aristocratic, rebellious and passionate, Pushkin lived with restless energy that often bordered on self-destruction. His involvement in scandals, gambling and duels created image of poet unable to adapt to calm bourgeois existence.

His death in duel at only thirty seven transformed him into almost romantic martyr of literature, figure consumed by honor, jealousy and impulsive temperament. This tragic aura still surrounds his work today.

Perhaps his greatest achievement remains Eugene Onegin, unique “novel in verse” balancing irony, melancholy and psychological insight with extraordinary elegance. Despite its lightness and wit, the book slowly reveals sadness of wasted possibilities, emotional emptiness and inability of characters to understand their own feelings until it is too late.

While later russian literature often became heavy and philosophical, Pushkin possesses clarity, grace and musicality that make him feel surprisingly modern even today.

Algernon Swinburne

Reading Algernon Charles Swinburne often feels less like reading poetry and more like being submerged into hypnotic waves of sound, sensuality and decay. His poems are overflowing with musical language, repetition and strange erotic melancholy that sometimes almost dissolves meaning itself.

Unlike colder and more intellectual poets, Swinburne writes with feverish intensity, creating atmosphere of exhaustion, beauty and self-destruction. There is something decadent in his work that later influenced not only symbolists and decadents but also modern dark aesthetics.

His poem “The Garden Of Proserpine” perhaps best captures this mood, presenting sleep, death and oblivion not as horror but as seductive release from suffering and noise of existence.

At his worst, Swinburne can become excessive and overwrought, drowning in his own verbal music, but at his best he achieves haunting rhythm unlike almost any other english poet of the nineteenth century.

Arthur Rimbaud

Arthur Rimbaud remains one of the strangest figures in literature, writing his visionary and often chaotic poetry while still practically a teenager. Reading him today still creates unsettling atmosphere of fever dreams, rebellion and spiritual decay. Unlike polished classical poets, Rimbaud often sounds fragmented, hallucinatory and violent, but beneath that there is strange melancholy and desire to escape ordinary reality.

Perhaps what makes him still modern is that his poetry feels dangerous and unstable, almost like psychological noir. After abandoning literature completely, becoming traveller and trader in africa, rimbaud turned himself into myth as much as poet.

While some later writers imitated only his chaos and self-destruction, his best poetry still possesses haunting beauty and dreamlike imagery difficult to forget.

Georg Trakl

Georg Trakl remains one of the strangest and most haunting poets of the early twentieth century. His poetry leaves a deep impression that seems to sink directly into the subconscious.

Collections such as Melancholy and Land of Dreams create an atmosphere of unreality, decay and profound sadness mixed with moments of almost feverish transcendence. Trakl’s world is filled with twilight streets, silence, autumnal colors, abandoned figures and dreamlike visions that often feel suspended between beauty and psychological collapse.

Before dedicating himself entirely to poetry, Trakl studied pharmacy and worked as an apothecary. His life was marked by psychological instability and drug dependence, particularly cocaine, which intensified the dark atmosphere surrounding both his life and work.

Critics and biographers have often discussed the unusually intense emotional bond between Trakl and his sister Grete, a relationship that continues to give his poetry an unsettling emotional undertone.

What makes Trakl unique is that his poems rarely function as direct statements or narratives. Instead, they work through mood, repetition and imagery, creating a hypnotic feeling closer to dreams or half-forgotten memories than conventional poetry.

Charles Williams - A Touch Of Death

A Touch of Death, much like The Hot Spot, revolves around a man driven by greed and a fatal woman who gradually pulls him deeper into destruction.

Perhaps this is a worn-out noir cliché, but Charles Williams uses his storytelling skill to create a powerful noir atmosphere and a dark psychological struggle between desire and doom. His prose is direct and economical, yet capable of building constant tension beneath seemingly ordinary scenes.

What makes the novel particularly memorable is its ending.
(Spoiler ahead.)

As the protagonist waits for the woman to return from the bank with the money, he notices a girl passing beside the car and continuing down the street. At that moment, reality itself begins to collapse for him. Arrested by the police and abandoned by everyone around him, he starts wondering whether the woman even existed at all, and why nobody believes she was real.

The final pages create an almost hallucinatory sense of paranoia and emotional disintegration, elevating the novel above routine pulp material.

Hard Case Crime also deserves praise for reissuing the novel in an attractive edition with a fittingly evocative cover design.

Paul Cain - Fast One

Fast One is a maelstrom of hard-boiled violence, written in such a dense and stripped-down style that at certain points it becomes difficult to follow exactly what is happening. Evidently assembled from previously published short stories, the novel follows the gangster Kells and the woman around him through a brutal underworld where virtually every character seems devoid of redeeming qualities.

The constant betrayals, shootings and rapid-fire dialogue create an atmosphere resembling a vicious dogfight, and the novel’s overwhelming nihilism occasionally verges on self-parody, almost like an extreme variation of Red Harvest by Dashiell Hammett.

Paul Cain himself remains a mysterious literary figure. Apart from this novel and a small collection of stories, little is known about him, which only adds to the strange aura surrounding his work.

No Exit Press did a fine job of designing this book with an attractive cover artwork.

The Best American Noir Of The Century - ed. Otto Penzler & James Ellroy

The Best American Noir of the Century is a strong anthology of noir crime fiction, with an insightful introduction by Otto Penzler and James Ellroy.

The selection brings together both the “old school” noir tradition and more contemporary voices.

Among the classic authors, the standout stories include:

• James M. Cain – Pastorale
• Steve Fisher – You’ll Always Remember Me
• Day Keene – Nothing to Worry About
• Howard Browne - Man In The Dark (chandleresque little noir gem)
• David Goodis –  Professional Man (a melancholic, restrained piece)
• Dorothy B. Hughes – The Homecoming
• Gil Brewer – The Gesture
• Cornell Woolrich – For the Rest of Her Life (famously adapted by Rainer Werner Fassbinder as Martha)
• Patricia Highsmith – Slowly, Slowly in the Wind

The “new blood” section also contains interesting and diverse interpretations of noir, including:

• James Lee Burke – Texas City, 1947
• Harlan Ellison - Mephisto in Onyx (a strange blend of noir and supernatural)
• Jeffrey Deaver – The Weekender
• Lawrence Block – Like a Bone in the Throat
• James W. Hall – Crack
• F. X. Toole – Midnight Emissions (boxing-themed noir)
• Elmore Leonard – When the Women Come Out to Dance
• Scott Wolven – Controlled Burn
• Thomas H. Cook – What She Offered
• Andrew Klavan – Her Lord and Master

Overall, I enjoyed reading this anthology. However, its length (around 600 pages) and softcover format, combined with relatively small print, sometimes made it physically uncomfortable to read for long periods.

The original hardcover edition published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt is probably more comfortable and better designed, but the Windmill Books edition I own still offers a strong reading experience.

Hard Boiled : An Anthology Of American Crime Stories - ed. Bill Pronzini & Jack Adrian

Hard-Boiled: An Anthology of American Crime Stories, edited by Bill Pronzini, is a solid selection of American hard-boiled stories, accompanied by a good and informative introduction in which Pronzini emphasizes the specifically American spirit of the genre—individualism, lone wolves, mavericks, gunmen, and small-time criminals drifting through urban landscapes.

Like any large anthology, the book is uneven, but it offers enough quality stories to justify the reading. Among the highlights are works by Raoul Whitfield, Paul Cain, and Norbert Davis, who capture the essence of the hard-boiled style through fast pacing and sharp dialogue.

Particularly notable are “Mistral,” “Trouble Chaser,” and “Who Said I Was Dead?”, while “Black Pudding” by David Goodis brings a characteristic sense of melancholy and doom. “So Pale, So Cold, So Fair” by Leigh Brackett and “A Piece of Ground” by Helen Nielsen further broaden the range, showing how the genre can function beyond its hardest edges.

However, as the anthology moves toward more recent authors, a certain decline in quality becomes noticeable—these stories feel less focused and lack the raw energy and clarity of early hard-boiled writing.

One minor disappointment is the presentation itself: small print, plain formatting and lack of illustrations make the anthology feel somewhat sterile. Hard-boiled fiction thrives on atmosphere, and one is reminded of McLuhan’s idea that “the medium is the message.” Compared to beautifully designed noir editions such as Centipede Press’s Woolrich collections, this volume often feels more archival than immersive.

Bloody Murder -From The Detective Story To The Crime Novel - Julian Symons

Bloody Murder is a useful reference book, but Julian Symons often comes across as rambling, jumping from one topic to another. What stands out most is his clear preference for puzzle novels and the classic British tradition, while writers such as Cornell Woolrich, Jim Thompson, and David Goodis are largely dismissed or marginalized, and Lionel White is not even mentioned. Despite these flaws, Bloody Murder remains a useful book for more advanced students of crime fiction.

Cornell Woolrich - Speak To Me Of Death

Another writer known for his short stories aside from novels is Cornell Woolrich, a reclusive and somewhat elusive figure whose paranoid fiction helped shape the noir tradition as we know it today.

There are many collections of Cornell Woolrich’s stories, as he was a prolific writer, but I chose this particular volume from Centipede Press — a high-quality edition with striking illustrations by Mat Mahurin and an insightful introduction by Thomas C. Renzi, author of Cornell Woolrich: From Pulp Noir to Film Noir. The book contains fifteen stories, the most famous of which is Rear Window, famously adapted into a film by Alfred Hitchcock.

The introduction provides a useful entry point into Woolrich’s world, characterising his stories as “momentum narratives,” where a single mistake sets off an irreversible chain of events leading to ruin. It also highlights key aspects of his prose: a fatalistic sense of destiny from which the protagonist cannot escape, the instability of perception, and the use of ironic, double-reversal twists in the tradition of O. Henry.

Two of the stories in this collection I had already encountered in various anthologies — Dusk to Dawn and Wardrobe Trunk. Among the remaining pieces, several stand out. Rear Window is of course the most famous, later adapted by Alfred Hitchcock into a classic film. Marihuana is a striking story about a man who becomes psychologically unhinged under the influence of the drug, culminating in a strong twist ending. Post Mortem is another effective piece, while The Death of Me is an excellent identity-switch narrative in which a killer assumes the identity of a dead man.

The Night Reveals is a solid entry, and Three O’Clock is particularly strong — a tightly constructed story of a man planning to murder his wife, only to fall into a trap of his own making. Finger of Doom and The Corpse Next Door are more modest, but still engaging. The strongest story in the collection, however, is Speak to Me of Death: a hallucinatory nightmare that was later reworked into the novel Night Has a Thousand Eyes and adapted into a notable noir film.

What stands out across these stories is a distinctly pulpy style — less concerned with the detailed character work found in writers like Stanley Ellin, and more focused on momentum, situation, and suspense. Yet despite that relative lack of psychological depth, the stories remain highly engaging, tightly constructed, and often genuinely thrilling.

Overall, this is an excellent collection — though perhaps not one to be read late at night.

Stanley Ellin - The Specialty Of The House

Crime fiction is generally better suited to the novel than to the short story, which is why it’s always refreshing to come across those rare writers who built their reputation primarily on short fiction. That is certainly the case with Stanley Ellin and his collection The Specialty of the House.

I had already encountered some of his work in various anthologies — You Can’t Be a Little Girl All Your Life, The Nine to Five Man, and The Question. The stories collected here are often quite strange. For example, The Orderly World of Mr. Appleby follows a man obsessed with his antique shop, while Broker’s Special is another standout, along with The Blessington Method, Day of the Bullet, and several others.

As H. R. F. Keating noted, Ellin’s stories are “enormously varied in plot and setting, linked first by clarity of style, and second by a fascinatingly bizarre view of the world and its people.”

But while these stories are generally well written, they seem to lack the kind of passion and obsession that reveal the writer’s soul.

The Crime Masterworks edition is well produced in hardcover, with an attractive dust jacket and an introduction written by Ellin himself.

Peter Lovesey - The False Inspector Dew

I like good classic English whodunits, although there are very few of them. This 1983 novel was a pleasant surprise.

Although it’s written in the style of the 1920s, it actually plays with the genre itself. It is based on the real-life case of Dr. Crippen, but the story follows Baranov, a dentist, and his wife Lydia, who plans to travel to America to try her luck in films. Things become complicated when Baranov meets Alma, a somewhat eccentric girl who sees the world through the lens of romantic novels. She falls in love with him, and together they devise a plan to kill Lydia and throw her into the river.

However, another murder occurs on the ship. Baranov, traveling under the false name Walter Dew, is mistakenly taken for the famous inspector. The ship’s captain accepts him as an authority and asks him to lead the investigation.

This is where the novel becomes truly interesting—not because of the question “who is the killer,” but because of how a man, simply through his behavior and confidence, manages to convince everyone around him that he is someone else.

One Deadly Summer - Sebastian Japrisot

I watched the French film One Deadly Summer starring Isabelle Adjani and it stayed with me. There’s something about that story that doesn’t let go, a quiet unease that lingers long after it ends.

So I looked up the novel of the same name by Sébastien Japrisot.

As you may have known, it's a story of a young girl Elle who seeks revenge on three men that raped her mother years ago in one winter day.

The first half of the novel is very good. The atmosphere is dense, the characters feel real, and the story moves in a direction that promises a lot. There’s that slow, summery feeling with something dark underneath.

But as the novel goes on, it becomes strange. As if it starts to fall apart from within.

It increasingly feels like this is not just a story about one girl, but about a tragedy passed down from generation to generation. Something that cannot be avoided, only repeated.

The saddest part is what happens to Elle. It’s as if she retreats back into childhood, losing touch with reality, until she eventually ends up in a mental institution.

In the end, it feels like everything was predetermined.

James Ellroy - White Jazz

With White Jazz, the final entry in the L.A. Quartet, James Ellroy pushes his experimental style to the extreme.

The fragmented prose, already present in the earlier books, becomes almost overwhelming here. Sentences are cut, thoughts are compressed, and the narrative often feels chaotic and disjointed. At times, it works. At other times, it feels forced and unnecessarily psychedelic.

The plot revolves around Dave Klein investigating a break-in connected to a deeply disturbed family. The father is a major drug dealer, the daughter is a prostitute, and the son appears to be obsessively attached to her. This alone creates a sense of moral decay that is typical of Ellroy, but the novel doesn’t stop there.

Another subplot follows a runaway actress connected to Howard Hughes, portrayed here as a deeply unwell figure. She ends up acting in a low-budget film produced by Mickey Cohen, who is depicted as a fallen man reduced to working with alcoholics and fringe figures. These elements add to the sense of a collapsing world, where everyone is compromised and nothing feels stable.

As the novel progresses, the narrative becomes increasingly difficult to follow. Characters blur together, motivations become unclear, and it often feels like no one fully understands what they are doing — including the reader. The story turns into a kind of fever dream, driven more by sensation than by logic.

This is Ellroy at his most extreme: dirty, chaotic, and completely unrestrained. For some readers, this will be the ultimate expression of his style. For others, it may feel like excess without control.

In the end, White Jazz is less a traditional crime novel and more a descent into narrative breakdown — a book where structure collapses under the weight of its own intensity.

James Ellroy - The Big Nowhere

Out of all the novels in L.A. Quartet, The Big Nowhere is the one that impressed me the most.

The novel opens with a notorious wave of anti-communist witch hunting in America. This storyline, investigated by Malcolm Considine, is interesting in itself, especially once Buzz Meeks enters the picture. Still, for me, this is not the true core of the novel.

The heart of the book lies in the investigation of a serial killer, followed by Danny Upshaw. His character stood out the most. Not only because of the disturbing and brutal nature of the murders, but also because of the way his personal life slowly collapses as he becomes entangled in both the homicide case and the anti-communist purge.

Upshaw is a tragic figure. His involvement in the investigation of communist organizations only deepens his internal conflict, leading to an inevitable and devastating end. Ellroy builds his character with a sense of doom that feels unavoidable from the very beginning.

Reading James Ellroy is like stepping into a filthy bar late at night — a place filled with outcasts, criminals, corrupt policemen, and constant noise. There is no comfort, no elegance, only decay and tension. The prose is fragmented, aggressive, and relentless, pulling the reader deeper into a world where morality is blurred and violence is everywhere.

What makes The Big Nowhere effective is not just its plot, but its atmosphere. Ellroy doesn’t suggest darkness — he throws you into it. The novel is crowded with characters and subplots, but at its best, it delivers moments of pure noir intensity, especially through Upshaw’s storyline.

Even if Ellroy’s style can become exhausting, this novel shows him at his strongest: obsessive, chaotic, and completely uncompromising.

Lioner White - Too Young To Die/The Time Of Terror

I grew accustomed to reading Lionel White as a writer of heist novels about doomed men. His characters are usually trapped in situations where everything is carefully planned, yet there is always a sense that things will fall apart. Still, as a reader, I keep hoping that their schemes will somehow prevail.

Too Young to Die offers an interesting variation on this formula. At its center is a heist mastermind who unexpectedly falls in love with a young girl. This emotional element gives the novel a different tone and, at times, it reminded me of those paranoid crime stories from the 1970s, where relationships are fragile and constantly threatened by violence and distrust.

To cut the story short, the plan inevitably collapses. During a shootout, the girl is wounded and later dies in a remote hideaway, while the protagonist ends up surrounded by relentless, almost western-like lawmen. The final act has a fatalistic quality that feels both inevitable and fitting, reinforcing White’s recurring theme: no matter how clever the plan, the outcome is already sealed.

The second novel, The Time of Terror, is also strong, though in a different way. It follows a man who has lost everything — his job, his family — and decides to kidnap a young boy. The premise is simple, but effective, driven more by desperation than calculation. As in many of White’s works, the tension comes not from elaborate plotting but from watching a man unravel under pressure.

What makes White stand out is his ability to combine straightforward prose with a persistent sense of doom. Unlike more stylistically ambitious writers, he doesn’t rely on atmosphere or psychological introspection as much, but he understands structure and pacing. His novels move quickly, yet always toward the same destination: failure.

In that sense, White delivers exactly what I expect from him — stories about men who plan, hope, and act, only to discover that their fate was decided long before the first move.

Harry Whittington - A Ticket To Hell/Hell Can Wait

When I first heard about Harry Whittington, he was often mentioned alongside the great pulp and noir writers of the 1950s. His name appeared in Stark House reprints and in discussions about forgotten crime fiction authors who supposedly deserved rediscovery. Naturally, I expected something raw, atmospheric, maybe in the tradition of David Goodis or Charles Willeford.

After reading the Stark House edition containing Ticket to Hell and Hell Can Wait, I was surprised – and not in a good way.

Ticket to Hell starts with an intriguing premise: a drifter arrives at a remote motel and saves a young woman from her violent boyfriend who seems ready to kill her. This setup suggests a tense, morally ambiguous noir story. However, the novel quickly shifts into something much more conventional when it is revealed that the protagonist is actually working for the FBI and is on a mission to rescue a kidnapped boy. What begins as a potentially gritty, personal story turns into a predictable crime thriller filled with clichés and familiar plot turns.

The second novel, Hell Can Wait, follows a man who plans revenge against the driver responsible for a car accident that killed his wife. Revenge stories are a staple of crime fiction, but here the execution feels mechanical and uninspired. The characters lack psychological depth, and the plot unfolds in the most expected way possible, without the moral complexity or stylistic flair that defines the best noir fiction.

What disappointed me most was not just the use of clichés, but the overall flatness of the prose. Where writers like Goodis or Woolrich create atmosphere through mood, desperation, and poetic bleakness, Whittington’s writing in these two novels feels functional and rushed, as if produced to meet a deadline rather than to tell a compelling story. The dialogue is serviceable but rarely memorable, and the emotional stakes never feel fully real.

This is not to say that Whittington had no talent or that all of his work is without merit. Like many pulp writers of his era, he wrote quickly and prolifically, often under pressure from publishers. In that sense, he can be seen more as a professional craftsman than an artist. Still, based on Ticket to Hell and Hell Can Wait, it is difficult to place him in the same category as the truly distinctive voices of mid-century crime fiction.

Stark House deserves credit for keeping these books in print, as they provide a window into the vast landscape of mid-century pulp publishing. But as literature, these two novels serve more as historical curiosities than as forgotten masterpieces waiting to be rediscovered.

For readers exploring classic noir today, Whittington might be of interest for completists or for those curious about the broader pulp ecosystem. However, those looking for the emotional intensity of Goodis, the psychological precision of Highsmith, or the stylistic elegance of Chandler may find these novels surprisingly hollow.

In the end, reading Ticket to Hell and Hell Can Wait was a useful reminder that not every rediscovered pulp author is an overlooked genius. Sometimes, a hack is simply a hack – and even that has its place in the history of crime fiction.

Charles Willeford - Hoke Moseley Omnibus

Charles Willeford is often described as a kind of “Philip K. Dick of crime fiction.” Just as Philip K. Dick created strange, off-kilter worlds in science fiction, Willeford brings bizarre situations and unusual characters into the crime novel, often subverting the expectations of the genre.

The series about detective Hoke Moseley is particularly interesting in that respect.

Miami Blues is perhaps the best-known novel in the series, largely because of the unforgettable villain Frederick Junior Frenger. He is one of those criminals who seems completely unpredictable and dangerous, which gives the novel both energy and dark humor.

New Hope for the Dead was somewhat less interesting to me. Much of the plot revolves around old unsolved cases that Moseley has to reopen, and the pace therefore feels slower than in the first novel.

I liked Sideswipe the most. The premise itself is unusual: Moseley suddenly decides to move into a hotel run by his father in order to get away from everything for a while. At the same time another storyline unfolds involving a bizarre group of characters planning a supermarket robbery: a psychopathic small-time criminal, a confused retiree who no longer knows what to do with his life, a prostitute with a disfigured face, and a Black painter. This strange combination of characters gives the novel an almost grotesque tone.

The Way We Die Now is also good, particularly because of Moseley’s undercover assignment and the interesting character of a former convict who, after being released from prison, moves into a house across the street from him.

What I would criticize is Willeford’s somewhat dry writing style. Also, the edition I read from Orion Books is a paperback, which is not ideal for a book of more than 800 pages—something of that length would have been much better in hardcover.

Andrew Spicer - European Film Noir

I had high expectations from European Film Noir by Andrew Spicer, hoping for a broad and illuminating exploration of noir across the continent. Instead, the book mostly confirmed something I was already aware of: outside France, the European noir landscape is relatively limited.

The chapters on Germany, Spain, and Italy underline how few fully realized noir films emerged from those countries. While this may be historically accurate, it makes the study feel somewhat thin. The section on French noir is solid, but for anyone already familiar with the major films and critical discussions, it offers little that feels new or revelatory.

Another drawback is the book’s visual presentation. For a study devoted to a highly stylized cinematic form, it contains surprisingly few photographs. The overall design is rather plain and unattractive, which is disappointing in a book about a visually driven genre.

In the end, European Film Noir works better as an introductory academic survey than as a visually rich or groundbreaking reassessment of the genre. For readers already immersed in noir history, it may feel more dutiful than exciting.

Amanda Cross - Death In A Tenured Position

Death in a Tenured Position is a crime novel written by Amanda Cross, the pseudonym of literature professor Carolyn Heilbrun.

The novel tells the story of the first woman to receive a tenured position at a formerly all-male college. Instead of triumph, she is met with indifference, passive aggression, and institutional coldness. The mystery element is present, but atmosphere dominates — a pervasive sense of isolation, academic vanity, and quiet cruelty. In the end, it is revealed that her death was not a murder but a suicide, which casts the entire narrative in a darker and more unsettling light.

Heilbrun herself was a distinguished scholar and feminist critic who taught for many years at Columbia University. Throughout her academic career, she spoke openly about the subtle and overt discrimination women faced within universities, particularly in elite institutions that were slow to accept women as intellectual equals. Under the name Amanda Cross, she used detective fiction not only as entertainment but as a vehicle to explore gender politics, professional exclusion, and the emotional cost of institutional resistance.

Late in life, Heilbrun chose to end her own life at the age of seventy-seven. While it would be simplistic to read the novel as autobiographical, the themes of isolation, aging, autonomy, and the pressures placed upon accomplished women inevitably resonate more strongly in light of her personal history.

Emili

Sedeo sam sa mojim drugarom detektivom u restoranu i slušao njegov izveštaj pokušaja otmice male Emili. Gangsteri su bežali od policije tokom pljačke banke i videvši malu Emili pokušali da je otmu i ucene njene bogate roditelje. Priča mu je bila malo nepovezana pošto smo i ja i on bili pijani.

-Slušaj, Čede. Evo kako je bilo.

-Probudio  sam  se  u  pola  sedam  uveče, sa  osrednjom  glavoboljom. Soba  je  bila  zamračena, roletne  spuštene. Ljudi  koji  pate  od  glavobolja  su  osetljivi  na svetlost. Pišalo  mi  se. Kurac  je  bio  čvrst  i  topao. Uzeo  sam  kafetin  sa  noćnog  stočića  i  flašu  tople  vode, i  popio  ga. Jedan  kafetin  je  dovoljan. Nosio  sam  gaće  marke  „Hugo-Boss“, sive  boje. Izvadio  sam  kurac  i  počeo  da  ga  drkam. Omirisao  sam  svoje  prste, spustio  pljuvačku  na  njih, i  nastavio  da  drkam. Usmeravao  sam  svoje  misli  ka  postizanju  vrhunca, i  naposletku  svršio. Jedna  peruška  mi  je  pala  na  butinu, dunuo  sam  i  oterao  je, ali  se  ona  ponovo  vratila. Zagledao  sam  se  malo  u  procep  na  roletni  kroz  koji  je  proticao  zrak  sunca, raznosio  prašinu  i  ustajali  vazduh, i  padao  na  moju  butinu, osvetljavajući  linije  sperme  koje  su  curile  niz  nju. Ustao  sam  i  navukao  papuče, otišao  da  pišam. Napolju  se  mogla  čuti  graja  dece. Penzioneri  su  šetali. Dok  sam  pišao, slušao  sam  moju  malu  komšinicu  kako  vežba   pevanje  kroz  zid  kupatila. Pritisnuo  sam  vodokotlić  koji  je  zagušio  njeno  pevanje  i  napustio  kupatilo. Kroz  par  trenutaka  pevanje  se  ponovo  počelo  dizati. Podjoh  u  kuhinju  da  skuvam  kafu. Voleo  sam  3  u  1. Kad  sam  skuvao  kafu, podigao  sam  roletne  jednim  potezom  i  pustio  svetlo  u  sobu. Iako  sam  spavao  tek  tri  sata  nisam  se  osećao  umoran. Seo  sam  na  terasu, srknuo  kafu  i  zapalio  cigaretu. Malo  sam  se  prodrhtao, zgrčio  pa  opustio. Uzeo  sam  moj  plavi  durbin  i  uperio  ga  u  susednu  zgradu. Gledao  sam  moje  susede  uveličavajućim  durbinom, praksa  koju  sam  upražnjavao  od  rane  mladosti. U  jednom  stanu  je  goreo  požar, ljudi  su  uzbudjeno  vikali, a  ispred  zgrade  se  okupila  masa  ljudi. Ubrzo  su  stigla  vatrogasna  kola. Starci  su  žučno  negodovali  zbog  nepažnje  stanara.

-Ništa  ne  paze, ti  ljudi! Jedna  neugašena  cigareta, i  ode  sve  u  kurac!

Njegov  prijatelj  se  složio  sa  starčevim  mišljenjem, i  njih  dvoje  nastaviše  šetnju  gledajući  u  zemlju. Sa  moje  terase  se  pružao  lep  pogled  koji  se  protezao  ka  horizontu  i  gubio  u  suncu  i  oblacima. I  tako, spuštala  se  noć. Bio  sam  nadasve  u  nekakvom  ushićenju. Naoblačilo  se  i  poče  tiha  grmljavina. Glavobolja  je  neprimetno  prestala, kao  dlanom  ruke  odnešena. Hladan  letnji  vetar  poče  strujati  kroz  vazduh, i  ja  ga  udisah. Uvek  osetim  priliv  čudnog  zadovoljstva  kad  me  prestane  glavobolja. Sevnu  munja. Puče  grom  i  pade  jaka  kiša. Noć  je  već  potpuno  preuzela  smenu, i  nikoga  više  nije  bilo  na  ulicama, osim  jedne  žene  koja  je  trčala  pokrivajući  se  jaknom  i  vodeći  svoje  dete  za  ruku. Posmatrao  sam  mokro  lelujavo  drveće  i  saobraćajne  znakove. Pored  puta  se  nalazila  jedna  stara  kafana. Kroz  durbin  sam  unutra  ugledao  neke  ljude  što  piju  pivo  i  prevlače  rukama  po  bradi, dok  je  svirala  stara  narodna  muzika  harmonike. Sve  je  bilo  tako  tiho  i  nepomično, osim  jedne  kese  koju  je  nosio  vetar. Bacio  sam  pikavac  kroz  terasu, i  povukao  se  u  svoju  sobu. Uzeo  sam  malo  hleba  sa  sirom. Posle  sam  skuvao  crnu  kafu. Pokušavao  sam  malo  da  radim, da  se  nečim  bavim. Ali  nisam  mogao. Mislio  sam  na  moju  Anabelu. Seo  sam  na  pod  prekrštenih  nogu  i  gledao  njene  fotografije. Srknuo  sam  malo  kafe  crne  kao  noćno  more, i  upalio  kompjuter, i  pustio  neku  tihu  muziku, koja  se  mešala  sa  udarcima  kišnih  kapi. Oko  mene  su  bili  mnogi  ispisani  papiri, drveni  čiviluk, sto, stolica. Pepeljara. Ipak, smogao  sam  snage  da  pročitam  nekoliko  stranica  uz  božju  pomoć. Blizu  mog  mesta  se  nalazila  pruga, pa  sam  često  slušao  vozove. Ali  odjednom  začuh  nečije  korake  u  hodniku  zgrade. Podigoh  glavu  i  skočih  pažljivo  do  vrata, saguvši  se  i  izbacivši  zadnjicu  nazad  a  gornji  deo  tela  napred, pogledah  kroz  špijunku. Neki  čovek  se  spuštao  na  moj  sprat  izbijajući  iz  tame, i  naglo  se  okrenuvši  tako  da  mu  ne  videh  lice, stao  ukopan, kao  razmišljajući. Onda  nastavi  da  silazi. Odem  na  terasu  da  ga  vidim  kako  izlazi, i  vidim, prestala  kiša, udahnem  svež  vazduh. Čovek  izidje  iz  zgrade  i  podje  levo  ulicom  ka  centru, kako  mi  se  učinilo, krsteći  se. Bilo  je  12  sati. Gde  li  ide? Vratih  se  u  sobu  i  dugo  razmišljah  o  tome. Reših  da  se  bacim  pod  tuš, i  vrela  voda  mi  išuri  telo. Legnem  u  krevet  i  brzo  zaspih, i  sanjah  Anabelu, ali  vrlo  nejasno.

Sutradan  sam  ustao  malo  ranije, jer  sam  očekivao  poštara. Opet  nije  došao. Ponovo  glavobolja. Nestalo  mi  je  kafetina, pa  sam  uzeo  prašak  protiv  bolova. On  se  sipa  u  čašu  vode, promeša  i  popije, ali  je  ukus  neprijatan. Mrzovolja  me  obuhvati. Neko  mi  pozvoni  na  vrata, neka  žena.

-Dobar  dan, skupljamo  novac  za  decu  bez  roditeljskog  staranja. Samo  50  vaših  dinara  je  dovoljno  da  izvuče  osmejak  jednom  detetu.

-Nisam  u  mogućnosti.

Zatvorim  joj  vrata. Ko  zna  koliko  je  usamljenih  starica  prevarila  ta  narkomanka. Ona  im  dolazi  i  po  više  puta, ali  starice  je  zaborave, pa  misle  da  je  neka  nova. Pozvoni  mi  telefon.

-Halo?

-Gde  si, Pušinski! Boris  ovde.

-A, ti  si.

-Hoćeš  u  grad?

-Hoću.

Spustio  sam  slušalicu, i  zagledao  se  u  persijski  tepih. Boris  je  bio  moj  stari  drug, još  iz  mladjih  dana. Još  od  onda. Koliko  je  prošlo  od  tada? Koliko  istovetnih, suvih  dana, provedenih  u  istoj  sobi? Koliko  popijenih  kafa, pogleda  u  prazno, pročitanih  novina, televizijskih  programa? Pet  godina  nisam  izlazio  nikuda. Ponovo  me  je  obuzeo  stari  poznati  osećaj, grešan  i  lep. Lepo  je  uneti  malo  promene. Posle  toliko  godina. Naravno, ni  ovako  nije  loše. Nema  više  trzanja. Ali  nema  više  ni  onog  drugog. Naučio  sam  se  mirnom  življenju, bez  trzanja, mirnoći. Ništa  me  više  ne  može  potresti. Pa  ni  ovaj  poziv. Živim  uz  minimum  neophodnosti, kao  monah. Pogledao  sam  moju  neurednu  sobu. Danas  je  osetno  svežije, 14  stepeni. Taman  za  moj  svileni  crni  kaput. Iznad  kamina  je  visio  zidni  sat, a  iznad  njega  portret  moga  pokojnog  oca, koji  je  bacao  senku  duž  crvenog  tepiha  i  crnog  zida  ukrašenog  zelenim  zavesama. Odjednom  se  prisetih  kako  sam  kao  mali  ležao  sa  majkom, pio  med  i  mleko  i  posmatrao  igru  senki  na  plafonu  od  gradskih  svetala, lica  u  zavesama, svega  toga. Pogledao  sam  kroz  prozor  i  video  mog  bibliotekara  kako  šeta, uzvrpoljio  se  i  odmaknuo. Blizu  mog  mesta  se  nalazio  auto-put. Prodjoše  kola.

Izašao  sam  na  sporedni  izlaz  i  uputio  se  ka  taksi-stanici, krckajući  opalo  jesenje  lišće. Pozdravio  sam  moga  komšiju. Moj  trenutni  smeštaj  mi  je  odgovarao, udaljen, a  blizak  gradu. Boris  je  hteo  da  se  sretnemo  na  Dorćolu, ali  ja  nisam  hteo, zato  što  sam  tamo  rodjen. Predložio  sam  da  se  vidimo  kod  Crkve  Svetog  Marka. U  prolazu  do  taksija  sam  video  gradjevinsko  zemljište. Gradili  su  novu  zgradu. Krenuli  smo  brzo, proticali  su  prizori. Male  kućice  nanizane  jedna  pored  druge, opasane  ogradicama, tik  uz  prometnu  ulicu, pored  njih  zgradurine, pa  neke  uvale, prodavnice, mega-marketi, tržni  centri, razvaline, smećišta, mostovi, tuneli, podzemni  prolazi, betonske  konstrukcije, uspavani  soliteri, stotinu  čudesa. Prolaznici, kontejneri, klošari. Prodjosmo  luku. Čekao  sam  Borisa  10  minuta, kasnio  je, vragolan. Prema  njemu  sam  bio  dobar, jer  iako  je  u  suštini  bio  mentol, bio  mi  je  simpatičan. Bio  je  niži  od  mene, velikog  nosa, lica  kao  u  pacova, ali  širokih  ramena. Najzad  dodje. Pričali  smo  malo, ali  sadržajno. Pošto  sam  zapalio  sveću  u  crkvi  za  pokoj  duše, otišli  smo  po  travu, i  seli  u  park. Preko  puta  nas  su  sedela  dva  momka  i  gledala  nas. Boris  je  motao  travu.

-Borise, šta  nas  gledaju  ovi?

-Ja  mislim  da  i  oni  motaju.

-Hahaha! Sad  im  je  čudno  što  i  mi  motamo.

Boris  smota  i  zapali  džoint, povuče  par  dimova, i  predade  meni. Popušimo  mi  džoint, kad  oni  tipovi  krenuše  ka  nama.

-Momci, samo  da  vam  kažemo, videli  smo  nekog  tipa  u  plavom, tu  iza  parka.

-Ajde  da  idemo, Borise.

Uhvati  nas  neka  panika, i  mi  odemo  iz  parka  na  ulicu  koja  vodi  u  sportski  centar  „Milan  Gale  Muškatirović“. Ja  bacim  pogled  na  ono  dvoje, kad, oni  seli  na  našu  klupu.

-Borise, da  nisu  ovi  namerno  rekli  da  su  videli  pandura  da  bi  nas  oterali  i  seli  na  našu  klupu?

-Hahaha!

Trava  nas  je  uhvatila, i  krenuli  smo  trotoarom, u  lice  vetru, ka  dunavskom  keju, gore. Jedan  autobus  koji  je  išao  ka  nama  skrenu  ulevo. Mi  ga  shvatismo  kao  živo  biće. Išli  smo  naizgled  bez  cilja, i  došli  smo  do  reke. Stajao  sam  i  gledao  u  ogledalo  svetlucave, nemirne  reke. U  reci  je  bila  ukopana  olupina  starog, zardjalog  broda  koja  tu  leži  trideset  godina. Unutra  se  noću  skupljaju  klošari  i  narkomani, ludaci, i  pale  vatre. Oko  broda  je  reka  bila  crna  i  mutna. Lepo  je  unutra, i  šteta  što  brod  ne  radi. Boris  poče  pričati  kako  vidi  skrivene  dimenzije  prostora  i  vremena. Naravno, perturbacije  i  iskrivljenja  su  moguća. Često  smo  pričali  o  izmenjenom  doživljaju  vremene  i  prostora  pod  uticajem  droga, o  uplivu. Pozvali  smo  Duleta  da  dodje. On  je  bio  veoma  namučen  momak. Bio  je  nizak  i  krupan, nabijen. Imao  je  nešto  dečje  u  sebi, i  ranjeno. Motali  smo  drugi  džoint, kad  on  dodje. I  odmah  je  počeo  da  lupeta. Video  je  Isusa, vanzemaljce, dinosauruse. On  poče  da  puši  džoint  ko  stoka, zakašlje  se, i  sline  mu  izadju  iz  nosa  koje  on  obriše  nekim  lišćem. Posmatramo  površinu  reke, i  vidimo  nešto  kako  plovi  ka  nama. To  je  bila  policijska  kapa.

-Rečna  policija!

Izroni  policajac, sav  mokar  i  sluzav, obavijen  rečnom  travom. Sreća  što  nismo  imali  više  travu, inače  bi  nas  uhapsio.

-Naduvali  ste  se. Lepo  vam  je, a?

Mi  se  smejemo. Policajac  skoči  natrag  u  vodu, i  otplovi  kao  delfin. Mora  da  su  imali  neku  stanicu  u  dnu  reke. Riblja  policija, haha! Ali  on  se  vrati  i  ipak  nas  privede  zbog  rizli, i  dade  nam  maske  sa  kiseonikom  i  mi  zaronimo  sa  njim  do  dna  reke, do  neke  kućice  na  dnu. U  kućici  su  bila  dva  policajca, jedan  za  stolom, a  drugi  obešen  o  luster. Vrtela  se  ona  hladilica  na  plafonu  i  udarala  obešenog  čoveka. Policajac  za  stolom  je  bio  kapetan  riblje  policije, i  ličio  je  malo  na  šarana. Policajac  koji  nas  je  priveo  je  stajao  iza  nas. Kod  njih  je  dolazila  povremeno  žena  sa  pijace  da  uzme  svežu  ribu. Kapetan  se  zakašlja, izadje  mu  mehur  i  blato  iz  usta.

-Momci, loše  vam  se  piše. Predvidjena  kazna  za  vas  je  15  godina. Imamo  i  ćelije  ovde. Obešeni, pokaži  im  ćelije.

Obešeni  visi, udara  ga  hladilica. Kapetan  se  gromko  zasmeja  sebi  u  bradu.

-Ah, da, on  je  mrtav. Uvek  to  zaboravim. Čovek  svašta  zaboravi  ovde.

Kapetan  se  zagleda  u  sto, vodnjikav  i  prašnjav, popravi  neke  zgužvane  papire  i  pogleda  u  nas.

-Naravno, i  ja  sam  nekad  duvao, kao  i  vi, momci. Znate  šta, pustiću  vas  ako  me  neko  od  vas  naduva. OK?

Kapetan  skine  pantalone  i  izvadi  debelog  djoku. Plutajuće  blato  mu  predje  preko  lica.

-Ko  će  da  me  naduva?

-Što  vam  ne  duvaju  vaši  pomoćnici?

-He, he. Pa  ne  mogu  oni.

Ja, Dule  i  Boris  odlučimo  da  odigramo  zimi-zami-zum. Točak  sudbine  odabere  Duleta. On  mu  ga  ispuši, i  kapetan  poče  da  se  naduvava  kao  balon  i  iskoči  na  površinu  reke.

-Ah! Konačno  malo  vazduha.

Kapetan  uze  iglu  i  izbuši  se  i  vrati  se  u  stanicu  kao  mršavi, izduženi  starac  u  crnom  odelu. Pogleda  Duleta  sa  takvom  mržnjom  da  ovaj  poskoči  nazad. Onda  ode  na  kraj  sobe, u  neki  mrak. Mi  smo  bili  začudjeni. Drugi  policajac  je  otišao  iza  kućice  da  gleda  porno  magazine. Vrati  se, i  potera  nas  u  ćeliju.

-Ali  rekli  ste  da  ćete  nas  pustiti!

Policajac  nas  osmotri  blago  nakrivivši  glavu.

-Kapetan  je  usamljen  čovek, i  željan  je  društva. Maske  vam  neće  trebati, ćelija  je  izolovana.

Policajac  zalupi  vrata. Otpadne  malter  sa  zida. Ćelija  je  pružala  osnovne  higijenske  potrebe, ali  malo  čega  drugog. Bili  smo  jako  zgureni. Na  zidu  je  visila  okačena  slika  Eduarda  Manea „Doručak  na  travi“ u  kojoj  su  gola  devojka  i  obučen  mladić  doručkovali  ležeći  na  travi. Na  jednoj  naslonjači  je  sedeo  kostur, a  u  uglu  sobe  je  stajao  TV. Policajac  nam  kroz  otvor  ubaci  ribu  sa  hlebom. Mi  uzesmo  ribu  i  posedasmo  za  TV. Na  programu  je  bila  emisija  u  kojoj  su  debili  radosno  trčali  i  igrali  se  jedni  sa  drugima, grleći  se  sa  roditeljima  koji  su  ih  bodrili  da  nastave  da  trče, i  koji  su  ih  uveravali  da  nema  više  tih  ljudi  kojih  su  se  bojali. Prebacili  smo  na  drugi  program, u  kojem  su  neki  čuvari  kružili  oko  nekog  mesta. Na  trećem  programu  je  prikazivana  emisija  „Jebanje  mrtve  dece  na  sto  načina“ gde  je  krupan  muškarac  nabadao  mrtvu  devojčicu  na  kurac, na  ćetvrtom  je  lepa  devojka  vrtela  kukovima  u  ritmičnom  zanosu, dok  su  okupljeni  ljudi  sedeli  prekrštenih  nogu  i  gledali  je  kao  boga, a  na  petom  emisija  „Život  i  priključenija  Todora  Stavrofora“. Brzo  sam  prebacivao  programe, upečatljive  slike  su  se  smenjivale  u  krešendu. Mi  se  zagledali, i  zaboravili  na  naše  trenutno  stanje  koje  nije  bilo  naročito  povoljno. Proverili  smo  sve  mogućnosti, ali  nije  bilo  izlaza. Ali  kako  smo  upali, tako  ćemo  i  izaći. Prolazili  su  dani, porasla  nam  brada, pušili  smo  jedni  drugima. Jednog  dana  kapetan  udje  i  pusti  nas  na  slobodu. Izašli  smo  iz  reke  i  krenuli  prema  centru. Ušli  smo  u  čudno  zbijeni  i  neprirodno  visok  tramvaj  koji  nas  je  odveo  na  poprište  sukoba  dve  grupe  ljudi, i  tu  je  Dule  počeo  da  razgovara  sa  policajcima  o  nekoj  temi. Čekali  smo  ga  na  klupi, a  posle  otišli  na  kafu. Videsmo  nekog  misterioznog  čoveka  sa  šeširom. Dule  nam  predloži  da  odemo  kod  Uroša. Ušli  smo  u  pogrešni  autobus, ali  nas  nije  bilo  briga, pa  smo  išli  do  kraja, i  nazad. Tokom  vožnje  Dule  zaspa, pa  smo  ga  jedva  probudili. Udarila  ga  vrućina. Ko  zna  koliko  bi  krugova  okrenuo. Sišli  smo  kod  Vuka, i  spustili  se  u  podzemni  prolaz. Tu  smo  stajali  malo  i  slušali  kišu. Svidela  nam  se  ta  muzika. Kako  kaplje, kao  neka  praskajuća  tehno  muzika. Onda  smo  seli  ispred  video  kluba  da  odmorimo. Ja  sam  stavio  levu  nogu  na  neku  stolicu. Izadje  žena  iz  kluba  i  zaprepasti  se.

-Alo, bre, šta  radiš  to?

Tu  je  stajao  neki  čuvar  sa  pištoljem  za  pojasom, pa  smo  otišli  odatle, uvredjenog  ponosa. Penjali  smo  se  pokretnim  stepenicama, i  Dule  ugleda  malu  cigančicu  kako  prosi  novac. Reče  joj  da  će  joj  dati  20  dinara  ako  mu  popuši  kurac. Odu  oni  u  šumarak.  Dule  je  jebao  u  usta.

-Mala  cigančice, odmalena  prosiš  novac.

Ne  gledavši, Dule  upade  u  kanalizaciju. Jedva  se  izvukao  i  pobegao  od  ljudi  pacova. Ugledao  sam  prelepog  momka  od  15-ak  godina, mršavog, bronzanog, uskog  dupeta. Bilo  kako  bilo, dodjemo  mi  kod  Uroša. Tamo  sede  dva  narkomana, jedan  visok  i  mršav, drugi  nizak  i  debeo. Treći  je  ležao  u  krevetu  u  patikama  i  spavao. Bila  je  tu  i  neka  gola, mršava  devojka  bele  puti. Oni  duvaju  i  snifaju  koku  i  pucaju  heroin  pa  su  dali  i  nama. Onaj  što  je  spavao  se  probudi  na  miris  trave  i  poče  da  moli  ovog  visokog  za  koku.

-Daj  miii...

-Neću.

-Pičko.

Ovaj  mu  ipak  da, i  on  skuva  i  pukne  se. Zove  oca.

-Napravi  nešto  da  se  nažderem. Dolazim.

Pitamo  ga  da  nam  nabavi  eksere, i  on  ode  po  njih. Već  se  smračivalo. Brzo  se  vrati, i  mi  progutamo  eksere. Zove  ga  otac.

-Hoćeš  doći, sine?

-Nisam  više  gladan.

Posle  je  došao  još  jedan  narkoman. Počeli  su  da  pričaju  neku  narkomansku  priču, kako  su  jurili  pandurima  jugom  uskim  zvezdarskim  sokacima, kako  je  prošle  godine  bilo  više  koke, kako  je  Cvele  uzajmljivao  čarape  suzatvoreniku  u  CZ-u. Tresnuo  se  spidom, pa  blago  zanjihao. Droga  stupa  na  delo-kaza  Žare, smejući  se  grotesknim  ne-smehom, krastav  i  umrljan  krvnim  zrncima. Cvele  je  izgubio  spid, pa  napao  Žareta  šipkom. Tamara  je  uzela  Borisa  ustima  kleknuvši, a  ja  sam  joj  prišao  sa  ledja  i  prodro  u  njeno  belo  dupe  držeći  je  za  ruke. Tamara  se  otkači  od  naših  kurčeva  i  baci  u  kokainskoj  paranoji. Posle  smo  otišli  na  tehno  žurku, ja, Boris  i  Dule, a  šta  se  tamo  dešavalo, više  ni  ja  ne  znam. Mislim  da  je  bila  dobra  žurka. Ivana  mi  je  izdudlala  za  dva  eksera  na  klupi  pred  početak. Sećam  se  da  smo  pronašli  Mareta  na  klupi  u  parku, kako  spava  u  progorelom  kaputu, mrtav  pijan, sa  patuljkom  pored  sebe. Taj  patuljak  nas  je  odveo  na  putovanje  kroz  ružičasto  meso  i  uveo  u  podzemni  dvorac  jakog  svetla  i  menjajućih  oblika. Tamo  sam  video  Borisa-duplikata, i  popričao  sa  njim, okružen  iglama  u  močvari. Ali  otvorio  se  portal  i  upao  vukodlak  u  šumu  visećih  glava  devojaka, konci  mi  leteše  iz  prstiju. Sigurno  je  da  sam  te  noći  doživeo  ono  što  se  ne  da  iskazati  rečima, ili  kroz  misao. Znači, ono  što  se  ne  može  pojmiti. Možda  jedino  kroz  gubitak  sebe. Probudio  sam  se  oko  pola  4  ujutru, u  nekom  parku. Video  sam  ogromnu  maglu  pred  sobom. Čudno  sam  se  osećao, hodao  sam  kao  po  blatu. Napipao  sam  nešto  na  glavi, nešto  krzavo. Nebo  nije  bilo  nebo. Protresao  sam  glavu. Iz  nje  su  ispadali  nekakvi  kamenčići, potpuno  besmisleno. Kleknuo  sam  na  mekani  beton, i  u  njemu  video  lice  moje  Anabele.

-Anabela...

Iz  betona  su  izronile  njene  ruke  i  obuhvatile  me. Kroz  um  su  mi  prolazile  slike  u  kojima  se  teturam  ulicom, vozim  u  autobusu  gledajući  kroz  prozor  i  u  moje  prljave  pantalone, slike  poznate. Nalazim  se  u  krevetu  sa  Anabelom, ona  leži  na  stomaku, tucam  je  u  dupe, ona  svršava, vadim  kurac  i  prskam  je  u  ledja. Ulaze  neki  ljudi, nose  nas  sa  krevetom  u  bunar, padamo  a  krevet  se  rastvara  u  jato  ptica  koje  poleću  uvis, dočekujem  se  na  noge, Anabela  se  pretvara  u  pantera  i  nestaje  u  hodniku.

-Uhvati  me!

Jurim  je, ona  me  gadja  strelama, ležimo  sad  na  krevetu, diže  se  sunce, obasjava  njenu  guzu, ona  me  gleda  iza  ledja, iz  nje  izlazi  silueta  koja  iscrtava  samu  sebe, nadgradjuje, kao  voda  koja  spira  kamen. Anabela  ustaje, lice  joj  se  menja  kako  se  kreće, daje  mi  ogledalo, ne  prepoznajem  se, pogledam  u  Anabelu, nje  nema, vratim  se  ogledalu, umesto  njega  ona  mi  se  smeši, leži  ispod  mene, sedam  za  sto  i  jedem  tortu. Odem  za  kompjuter, igram  auto-trke. Ugledam  sebe  sa  Anabelom  u  hiper-marketu, pričamo, vozim  kolica. Oprosti  mi, Anabela. Ugledam  skupljača  konzervi  u  parku, izbija  dan  pun  belih  zvezda. Nekad  se  zapitam, da  li  se  to  stvarno  desilo? Neki  dogadjaj. Vidim  Borisa  u  autobusu, pa  mi  pobeže. Posle  ga  zovem. Kaže  da  je  kući. Hodam  sa  Anabelom  kroz  jutarnju  maglu, ona  iskrivi  glavu  i  udahne  maglu  pa  je  da  meni  kroz  svetlucavo  jutro  ona  je  suva...došao  sam  kući, aha, ključevi, dobro, tu  sam, zatvaram  vrata, malo  sam  sedeo  i  slušao  muziku, pa  lako  zaspao. Probudio  sam  se  posle  dva  dana  pod  neizbledelim  utiskom  koji  će  odjekivati  u  meni  dugo  vremena. Upalio  sam  kompjuter  i  počeo  da  pišem. Pisao  sam  deset  minuta, popušio  ono  malo  trave  što  je  ostalo, pogledao  kroz  terasu, otišao  da  kupim  sok  od  jabuka  slatko  umornim  korakom, sreo  neke  ljude, vratio  se, pa  ponovo  prošetao  da  kupim  cigare  povremeno  padajući  u  san  dok  sam  išao, ali  ipak  budan, vraćao  se  kući  svojoj. Uveče  sam  se  sastao  sa  Borisom, ispod  velikog  drveta, u  nekom  uvučenom  parku, malo  smo  prošetali, pa  se  rastali. Ja  sam  produžio  nekuda, bilo  kuda. Zašao  sam  u  zagradjenu  zonu  koja  se  krivila  na  levo  ukoso  pa  sam  klizio  u  daljinu  i  u  blesku  polarne  svetlosti  upao  u  prostoriju  u  obliku  ljudskih, ispucalih  usana...noć  je, uzimam  papir  za  crtanje  i  slikam  napuštenu  fabriku  koju  vadim  iz  napuklog  sećanja...dan  i  noć  se  prepliću...situacije  iskaču  nasumično  i  tiho  u  vrelom  letnjem  danu...duh  oslobodjen  tela  je  mučen  iznenadnim  udarcima  vetra...kroz  razbijene  filtere  fotoaparata  sam  pokušavao  da  uslikam  fotografije  izgubljenog  sećanja...dodje  mi  neka  pomisao, pa  se  izgubi, pa  je  tražim  puzeći  po  tepihu, uzmem  je  i  ona  se  raspadne  u  mojim  rukama...cigani  zauzeli  prostor  na  zelenom  vencu...u  pola  5  imam  kontrolu  u  Zavodu  za  kožne  bolesti, ulazim  u  njenu  ordinaciju  i  sedam  na  stolicu, skidajući  majicu, savijem  se  i  pokažem  joj  ledja  bela  i  stvrdnuta  od  tečnosti.

-Kako  vam  izgleda, doktorka?

-Dobro  je, smiruje  se. Kontrola  za  dve  nedelje. 

Vratio  sam  se  kući  i  legnuo  da  gledam  film  o  nekom  čoveku  majstoru  što  je  išao  na  putovanje. Neko  mi  pozvoni  na  vrata. Pojavi  se  mladić  požutelog  lica, zakržljao.

-Dobar  dan, gospodine  Pušinski. Pozivam  vas  na  nedeljni  sastanak  udruženja  mrzitelja  bazena  u  19:30, u  haustoru  22.

On  ode. Sednem  na  stolicu. Kad  sam  se  ja  to  učlanio  u  udruženje  mrzitelja  bazena? Zar  tako  nešto  postoji? Potražim  u  jakni  člansku  kartu. Tu  je. Odem  u  mračnu  sobu, gledam  fotografije.

Evo  nas  na  sastanku. Dugački  sto, sede  ljudi, i  jedna  devojka  koju  sam  upoznao  u  foto-klubu, gleda  me  preko  stola, na  čelu  predsednik  visokog  čela. U  uglu  sedi  spremačica  i  puši  cigaru  zaklonjena  iza  ormana  sa  prašnjavim  knjigama. Iz  pukotina  na  stolu  izlaze  bubašvabe, i  jedna  mačka  kašlje  ispod  stola. Obrati  nam  se  predsednik.

-Gospodo, želim  čuti  vaše  akcije  tokom  ove  nedelje. Da  počnemo  od  vas, Mirko.

-Ja  sam  prošao  pored  jednog  punog  bazena, i  pogledao  ga  sa  jakom  mržnjom.

-Koliko  je  bila  jaka  ta  mržnja, Mirko?

-Mnogo  jaka.

I  tako  oni  pričaju, i  ja  zaspim. U  magnovenju  čujem:

-Gospodo, sastanak  je  završen. Pridružite  nam  se  u  velikoj  Sali  na  aperitiv, kasnije  će  biti  predavanje  ”Tehnike  odbrane  od  bazenskih  kompleksa”.

Na  vreme  izadjem  sa  njima  u  veliku  salu, gde  su  ljudi  stajali  i  pili  šampanjac  usporenim  pokretima. Prošunjam  se  i  izadjem  na  stražnji  izlaz  koji  vodi  kroz  prostorije  bioskopa  ”Balkan”, pa  iz  njega  izbijem  na  ulicu. Podjem  trotoarom  nizbrdo, ka  29-om. Udjem  u  tramvaj  hvatajući  se  za  šipke  i  sednem  iza  jednog  brkatog  čiče  sa  kapom  na  glavi. On  poče  pričati.

-Pušinski, mala  Emili  se  izgubila  u  šumi. Moraš  je  pronaći.

Izadjem  kod  podvožnjaka, ispod  vozne  stanice  ”Novi  Beograd”. Popnem  se  gore  tankim  metalnim  stepenicama  i  udjem  u  prazan  voz. Proveravam  koliko  imam  metaka  u  pištolju, sakrivši  lice  iza  crnog  šešira. Izadjem  kod  ranžirne  stanice  ”Makiš”. Makiš  je  jedna  velika  šuma  sa  močvarama  kroz  koju  prolaze  vozovi. Ima  i  nekih  kuća, ali  samo  pri  glavnom  putu, gde  prolaze  automobili  i  poneki  autobusi. Podjem  u  šumu, oko  mene  groblje  razlupanih  vozova  i  železničkog  materijala. Na  obzorju  se  vidi  velika  zgrada  popucalih  prozora, tkz. Centar  za  opravku  vozova  gde  hodaju  umrljani  mašinci  i  radnici, a  vozovi  stoje  na  uzdignutim  postoljima. Zadnji  tragovi  sunca  su  preletali  preko  šikara, sve  je  bivalo  u  kohabitaciji. Udjem  unutra  i  vidim  malu  Emili  kako  čuči  kraj  velikog  železničkog  točka, umrljana  mašinskim  crnim  uljem  i  uplašena. Pridjem  joj, i  ona  mi  se  baci  u  zagrljaj. Lice  joj  čedno, nevino.

-Spasite  me, gospodine!

-Ne  brini  se, mala  Emili. Niko  te  više  neće  povrediti.

Uzmem  je  na  krkače  da  je  odvedem, ali  navrnuše  tri  gangstera  na  ulaz, koji  su  pre  toga  obigravali  spolja. Spustim  Emili, i  sakrijemo  se  iza  točka. Gangsteri  osuše  paljbu, varnice  sevaju. Ja  uzvratim, i  pogodim  jednog  u  čelo, a  drugog  u  stomak. Treći  me  pogodi  u  rame, ja  podignem  glavu  od  bola  i  vidim  gredu  koja  visi  na  plafonu  prikačena  konopcem, pucam  u  konopac  zadnjim  metkom  i  greda  se  otpusti  i  zgnječi  gangstera. Uzmem  Emili  za  ručicu  i  povedem  je  napolje  na  sunce  i  čistinu, i  mi  podjemo  kući, obasjani  crvenilom  zalaska  sunca.

Pušinski izgasi cigaretu i zapali novu, pa otpije malo piva.

-Emilini roditelji su me dobro nagradili što sam je spasao.

-Ćudan slučaj, reče Čed Piterson paleći cigaretu. Platili su račun i izašli iz restorana, pa krenuli do šetališta pokraj reke.