Sublime

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

wiped off the palms of my hands and turned it around. It was addressed to General Guy Sternwood, 3765 Alta Brea Crescent; West Hollywood, California.

It’s perhaps not surprising, then, that for a special “All Nations” issue of Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, Boucher convinced the editors to publish his translation of an Argentine poet and essayist hardly known within the United States. Thus, in that fateful EQMM August 1948 issue, beneath a typically garish cover showing a black-gloved woman be

Not handsome, exactly—in fact, he teetered on the edge of ugly: short and slightly stocky, with thinning black hair. But his skin was deeply tanned, as though he flew to the Mediterranean instead of the endless Minneapolis-Detroit-Chicago route, and his thick lips were sensual, his teeth startling white. He exuded a vitality and alertness that was