A Reader's Book of Days by Tom Nissley

Author:Tom Nissley
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company

1986 When he came to, on the center median of I-93 out of Boston, Andre Dubus first carefully explained to the police officer that he had three guns and was licensed to carry them. Then the pain hit. Dubus had pulled his car over to assist a woman and her brother who had just hit an abandoned motorcycle in the highway and had helped them to the median when another driver, avoiding the wreck, swerved off the highway and killed the brother and crushed Dubus’s legs. Dubus, recognized already as one of his generation’s finest short-story writers, lost one leg and the use of the other and lived in pain and depression for much of the last thirteen years of his life, but he continued to write, often about the accident and its consequences, saying more than once that having learned he had saved the woman by pushing her out of the way of the car, “Now I can never be angry at myself for stopping that night.”

July 24

BORN: 1802 Alexandre Dumas père (The Three Musketeers), Villers-Cotterêts, France

1916 John D. MacDonald (The Deep Blue Good-by), Sharon, Pa.

DIED: 1969 Witold Gombrowicz (Ferdydurke, Trans-Atlantyk), 64, Vence, France

1991 Isaac Bashevis Singer (Enemies, a Love Story; The Slave), 91, Surfside, Fla.

1895 Sigmund Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams had sold only a handful of copies when the doctor wrote to his colleague Wilhelm Fleiss, “Do you suppose that someday one will read on a marble tablet on this house: ‘Here, on July 24, 1895, the secret of the dream revealed itself to Dr. Sigm. Freud.’ So far there is little prospect of it.” Freud’s dream that fateful night, about a patient named Irma, was central to his book, where he interpreted it as an expression of his desire not to be blamed for her continuing symptoms. (Later analysts have argued Freud’s anxiety in the dream was in fact about his friend Fleiss, who had nearly killed Irma by leaving a foot and a half of gauze in her nose during an operation.) Freud’s self-fulfilling prophecy was indeed fulfilled when a marble tablet was erected at the site in 1963.

1901 William Sydney Porter, already writing stories under the name O. Henry, was released from prison after serving thirty-nine months for embezzling from his former employer, the First National Bank in Austin, Texas.

NO YEAR At a crime scene just after midnight, detectives banter until they find that the man down is one of their own, 87th Precinct detective Mike Reardon. When Evan Hunter began his 87th Precinct series with Cop Hater in 1956, making your detective a cop instead of a private eye or an elderly spinster was a new idea, as was basing a mystery series around a group of investigators (some of whom, like Detective Reardon, might die) rather than a single character. Also new was the name Hunter chose as his pseudonym for the series so there wouldn’t be any confusion with his “serious” novels like The Blackboard Jungle: Ed McBain. Hunter chose the name

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