Henry, Henry by Brian Willems

Author:Brian Willems [Willems, Brian]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-78535-548-6
Publisher: John Hunt Publishing
Published: 2017-06-30T04:00:00+00:00

“AND THEN YOU HAVE A LINE like that. You could base a whole novel on a line like that. A detective novel. You have all the clues right there, or, maybe not all the clues but the solution. That could be the last sentence of a detective novel, all the answers right there.”

“Where?” asked Mrs Purcell.

“Around that boy’s neck.”

“Sorry, I guess I wasn’t really listening. I mean, this novel has a lot of description in it, don’t you think. I mean, what boy? I thought you were talking about Marlow. Is he a boy? Isn’t that kind of young to be captain of a ship or whatever?”

“Not Marlow. The boy. Ok, I’ll back up a bit. I guess it’s more than one sentence, a couple. But you know what I mean. It’s an episode, a detail. Passim.“

“We’ll never get through this thing. I thought you said it was short?”

“So it’s like this…”

“But then again, I guess in a state like mine, I should be grateful for anyone willing to uplift my last days even in the slightest.”

“ ‘The man seemed young — almost a boy —’ ”

“What I really should do is thank you, Mr Austen, for your attention. God knows my son is off who-knows-where with who-knows-whom. And me with a coma coming on. Have you met that Martino boy? They always seem to be in some kind of strange trouble together.”

Mr Austen raised his voice a little, “ ‘…but you know with them it’s hard to tell. I found nothing else to do but to offer him one of my good Swede’s ship’s biscuits I had in my pocket.’ See, here we have the Swede again. Many pages later, suddenly the Swede appears again. I do think I’m onto something here. ‘The fingers closed slowly on it and held.’ ”

“I wouldn’t mind a biscuit.”

“What?”

“Nothing.”

“Sorry?”

“That Swede sure seems to like biscuits.”

“But this is the first time the biscuits are mentioned. You have no way to support your argument.”

“But think of it Mr Austen. Out there in Africa, so far away from home, and with a nice tin of biscuits. A man must surely love his sweets to make that kind of effort.”

“But you have misunderstood the whole point.”

“I bet that’s the answer to the mystery. The biscuits. It’s what you called, when we were reading The Last of the Mohicans, an ‘incongruent element’ if I remember rightly. Something that doesn’t fit, that sticks out. So it has to be a clue.”

“That’s preposterous. Heart of Darkness does not have ‘clues.’ And who ever heard of a detective novel based on a tin of biscuits? There were countless items of Western European origin in Africa at the time. The explorers practically brought the whole lot of Selfridges with them.”

“Just keep your eyes on those biscuits. You’ll see.”

“Fine. We’ll keep our eyes on the biscuits then. But listen up, and I think you’ll see my point: ‘The fingers closed slowly on it and held — there was no other movement and no other glance. He had tied a bit of white worsted round his neck.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.