His mother, Hope, was beautiful and proud. “When my mother walked down the street,” the book begins, “men noticed.” Bridge was proud of her, in spite of the precarious life she led with him — full of dangerous men and angry landlords and bloody, botched suicides. Bridge describes his mother in the courtroom scene in which he was officially removed from her care. “My mother was twenty-four years old, descended from a line of impoverished women, educated to the tenth grade, abandoned by a husband, and plagued with fear. Standing at the judging bar, she must have recalled courtroom encounters from her own childhood. Now, a woman among her betters, she could do nothing more than be still and be judged.” Helping vulnerable people, especially children and women, would become his life’s work. [LA Times]
Stephen Marlowe, a prolific writer of popular fiction best known for his crime novels featuring the globe-trotting private eye Chester Drum, died on Friday in Williamsburg, Va. He was 79 and lived in Williamsburg. The cause was myelodysplastic syndrome, a bone-marrow disorder, his wife, Ann, said. Mr. Marlowe wrote more than 50 novels in a range of genres, from crime to science fiction to historical fiction. The Chester Drum books combined elements of the hard-boiled detective story and the international espionage thriller. [NYT]
“The Fabulous Clipjoint” does for Chicago of the 1930s and ’40s what Jim Thompson did for the scruffy towns of Texas and California, and what Dashiell Hammett did for San Francisco — preserve forever, like bugs in amber, the seedy pleasures of our shared pasts. [Chicago Tribune]
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