Damon Runyon

"One evening along about seven o'clock I am sitting in Mindy's restaurant putting on the gefiltte, which is a dish I am very fond of, when in comes three parties from Brooklyn wearing caps as follows: Harry the Horse, Little Isadore and Spanish John."

So begins one of Damon Runyon's most anthologized stories, "Butch Minds the Baby," instantly recognizable for its voice, humour, characters, and use of the present tense.

Runyon's fiction came out of a life that spanned the lawlessness of two eras - the Old West and Prohibition on the East Coast.

As a newspaperman he covered wars and sporting events. He loved to gamble and hang out in nightclubs with gangsters, sometimes even accompanying them on the way to a job.

According to Breslin, Runyon preferred the company of gangsters because they were much more colourful than politicians and bigshot businessmen, who were equally corrupt:

It was unfortunate that Charles Barney was not smart enough to stop stealing even when he had to take his clothes out of the closet to make room for his money, and he continued into some impossibly corrupt real estate businesses. One day he woke up and found the only way he could see his way out was to blow his brains out, which he did. This did not stop his heirs, who founded Smith Barny stockbrokers and used as their motto, "We make money the old-fashioned way. We earn it." They should have said, "We steal it," but that's all right. This is America.

Patrice

The book opens and closes with Patrice, Runyon's second wife. He met her in Juarez when he was covering Pancho Villa. She was a barefoot girl just past 12 who wanted to be a dancer. He promised to find her a job in New York if she learned to read and write, and paid for her education. Years later he made good on his promise when she showed up unexpectedly in the Big Apple. She became his mistress and later his wife. He was 51 and she 26 when they married. The bridesmaid was his own daughter. His first wife had just died.

Together they fabricated a tale that made her a Spanish countess who possessed one of the 10 largest diamonds in the world. The fabrication was similar to one of Runyon's short stories, and so complete that they came to believe it themselves.

Patrice however chafed at the difference in their ages, and soon began fooling around with the boxer, Primo Carnera. Runyon arranged for Carnera to fight Joe Louis, whose body "looked like the electric chair." He delivered a beating to Carnera.

When Runyon was dying of throat cancer, his doctor asked Patrice to write a supportive letter to Runyon. Instead she wrote that she was now in love with a younger man.

Breslin

There are no footnotes or bibliography. Breslin relies instead on newspaper files and his own memory of stories he's heard over the years. At times he slips into the present tense, and tells it like a Runyon short story. It's incredible stuff -- Al Capone conducting an orchestra, Bugsy Siegel doing a screen test, Jack Dempsey slipping lead pipes into his gloves, Bat Masterson and Benito Mussolini writing for NYC papers.

At one point Runyon was the highest paid newspaper writer in the county. Several of his stories were made into movies. His most famous title is Guys and Dolls. He shares with several other literary greats the distinction of having contributed an adjective to the English language: Orwellian, Dickensian, Runyonesque. He had a liver "weak as a glass chin."

There are no pictures in the book. Here's one I found on the Web:

Insect Dreams

The Half Life of Gregor Samsa

It turns out the protagonist of Kafka's Metamorphosis didn't die after all. He joined a freak show in Vienna where, as "the human roach," he reads from Rilke and holds seminars on Spengler. Such is his notoriety that Wittgenstein and novelist Robert Musil pay him a visit, and in America he inspires a dance craze.

In New York he meets composer Charles Ives, and provides the inspiration for the "Insect Sonata," which is performed on the piano with the use of a brick and a couple of two-by-fours. Gregor goes to work at Ives's insurance firm, where he specializes in risk management and develops a formula to gauge the probability of a person being kidnapped. The formula incorporates an Index of Suffering -- "an original contribution of Gregor's, now in standard use among economists."

                    (unemployment rate in percent)(inflation in percent)
        S =  ----------------------------------------------------------------------
                 1 - (probabability of situation continuing another month)

He moves to Washington DC and takes up residence in a White House broom closet, working for the Dept. of Agriculture as an expert on entomological matters. The US is mired in the Great Depression, and Gregor, while studying grasshopper behaviour, discovers "smelltrons" and invents the Elektroantennograph and the Heuschreckekitzelapparat.

When war breaks out he meets Einstein and delivers his famous letter to FDR, then is reassigned to Los Alamos as a risk management consultant. He pals around with Feynman and Oppenheimer, and suggests the principle for the device used to trigger the atomic bomb.

By then Gregor's despair has deepened to an intolerable level; there's the wound in his back, FDR's dithering over the war, and the decision to continue the Manhattan Project even after Germany had abandoned its own efforts at an atomic bomb.

The book's humour, erudition, historical characters, and WW2 setting reminded me very much of Cryptonomicon and Gravity's Rainbow, but at 464 pages it is much shorter and not as convoluted. Interestingly, all three novels end explosively.

Viva la cucaracha!

The Lost City of Z

A Tale of Deadly Obsession in the Amazon

Percy Fawcett was an English explorer who became obsessed with finding El Dorado in the Amazon forest. He led several expeditions in search of it, each time emerging virtually unscathed while those around him sickened and died, their minds deranged, their bodies oozing pus and maggots. Piranhas, vampire bats, malaria, xenophobic tribes armed with 6-foot poisonous arrows -- these were just a few of the dangers involved.

Thanks to an iron constitution, ruthless determination, and suicidal bravery, Fawcett became one of the most famous explorers of the early 20th century. He seemed absolutely invincible -- until 1925 when he shocked the world by vanishing without a trace. Party after party set out in search of him, but many of them also disappeared, which only deepened the mystery. As time wore on, cults sprang up worshipping Fawcett.

More recently New Yorker author David Grann joined the ranks of the obsessed and set off to solve the mystery. The result is this compulsively readable book, which cleverly (and somewhat disingenuously) dovetails Grann's own journey with the final Fawcett expedition.

At the end he delivers a surprising conclusion. Fawcett wasn't so crazy after all. Recent findings by anthropologists such as Anna Roosevelt and Michael Hecklenberger seem to indicate that advanced civilizations did exist in the Amazon. One site has been dubbed the "Stonehenge of the Amazon."

Literary Echoes

The Lost World - Conan Doyle knew Fawcett and is believed to have used him as a model for one of the characters.

Indiana Jones and the Seven Veils - Who better to find Fawcett than Indy?

A Handful of Dust - Fawcett's fate likely inspired the ending of this Evelyn Waugh novel.

Gringos - An end-of-the-world cult called the Magical Nucleus reminded me of a similar cult in this Charles Portis novel set in the Yucatan.

The Lost City of Zzz...

Brad Pitt is not starring in the upcoming movie.

What sounds better? The lost city of Zee (Grann), or the lost city of Zed (Fawcett)?

There are interesting similarities between the lost expeditions of Fawcett and Franklin.

David Grann's website
Simon & Schuster book trailer