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Commentary on “Another Summer’s Reading”

Grant Tracey

The second section to “Another Summer’s Reading” begins with Eddie Sands’s wife reminding him that he’s not a detective. Eddie’s response? “I know hon, I know … I’m just a cab driver, but Clark died on my watch. I owe him. A debt has to be paid.”

This is the formal problem of writing a series of stories about a cab driver who fights crime. How to get him positioned as a kind of private investigator. Here, I borrow motivations right out of Sam Spade’s ethos in The Maltese Falcon: “When a man’s partner is killed you’re supposed to do something about it.” Spade follows a professional and personal code. He didn’t like Miles Archer, but he was his partner, murdered, and he has to fulfill an obligation to punish the guilty.

In the Eddie stories he’s somewhat of an avenging angel, a fella with a savoir complex. Eddie experienced brutality growing up in Iowa and later in the Korean War where he served as a radio operator in the battle of Pork Chop Hill. The recipient of two Bronze Stars, the spectre of war hovers as he protects women from domestic horror. In “This Town Called Winsome” he rescues a woman from suicide. After leaving his fare at the Daws Motel, he realizes she had no travel bags and checks back just in time.

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THERE ARE SEVERAL INFLUENCES on this work. Hammett of course, Rudolph Maté’s 1950 film DOA, and Ed McBain’s 1966 87th-Precinct novel, Eighty Million Eyes. In DOA, a salesman, Frank Bigelow, is given a slow-acting poison that there is no coming back from. In Eighty Million Eyes, a comedian, Sam Gifford, is murdered on live television by a delayed-action poison (a capsule within a capsule). I borrowed this idea and had the killer dentist place the slow dissolving “capsule” within a crown.

But what I’m most proud of in this story is the threading of two narratives: the world of academe and the marvelous writings of Bernard Malamud (my favorite literary writer). Pain and suffering are abundant in Malamud’s writings, and these themes hover around Eddie and his wife, Evelyn Williams.

I had no idea how this story was going to end. I mean, I knew who the killer was, but I didn’t know how to bring everything together (the crime narrative and the meta literary-academic narrative). So, I decided to return to a favorite trick of mine, a callback to something presented earlier in the story, a ball previously juggled in the air that I might take up juggling again. And that ball was the corkboard in the mayor’s office full of Polaroid snapshots of people who made a difference. What more can I do with this?

Suddenly, as I saw all that series of mayoral photographs, I had a strong association of my mother and father’s wedding album, and how in a third of the photographs, it seems, my father’s eyes were half-open or half-closed.

Both stories, Malamud’s and mine, end with “readings”: George Stoyonavich’s prepping to dig into one hundred library books and Eddie Sands’s failure to have read his wife into the “Tuesdays at the Library” story that she authored and his questioning of future “readings” of her.

Eddie loves his wife, but the final image of Eddie, sitting in an oversized chair with eyes half-closed, raises the question of how much does he really understand the depth of Evelyn’s suffering and pain, how much does he know her, and just as importantly how much does he really understand himself and know the world he navigates?

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Grant Tracey is the author of the Hayden Fuller Mysteries, including the forthcoming A Shoeshine Kill. His crime noir stories have been widely published: Freedom Fiction Journal, Femmes Fatale Flashes, Groovy Gumshoes, Tough, Magpie Lit, Twelve Winters Journal, Bang!, Merry Creepsmas: The Green Book, and elsewhere. He is a long-serving editor of North American Review, and teaches film and creative writing at University of Northern Iowa.

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