Sublime

at the end I hardly knew who I was or what I was doing.

Quite a strange man, thought James, watching him go – but what a relief to discover he still contained the capacity to be taken by surprise.

Hitchcockian protagonist,

watching bored teenage jerk-offs hack apart someone you used to love. Even if she was dead. He wasn’t without empathy, but he was still young, and the pain of other people embarrassed him.

That Thomas had worked for the Chronicle since 1976 was easily established, as was the fact that he’d published three brief novels since that date. Out of a sense of delicacy Carleton never mentioned that he owned all three of these, and found them elegant and elliptical, couched in prose that had the cadence of the King James Bible, and concerned

A moment later, wearing a corn-colored jacket over green velour pants and an orange-and-green-plaid tie, Jack Ashkenazy came in, followed by George Deasey, who, as ever, appeared to be in a testy mood. He was, as Anapol had mentioned, a graduate of Columbia, class of 1912. Over the course of his career, George Debevoise Deasey had published symboli