February 17, 2015

Cocktail Talk: Crawl Out of that Coffin!

league-greatful-deadI’ve had four different Day Keene Cocktail Talk posts – that’s nowhere near enough! C’mon me. Seriously. My appreciation, no, obsession with Mr. Keene and his pulptasticness is certainly not going down to a simmer any time soon. This is why it’s so swell that Ramble House is putting out all of Mr. Keene’s stories and novellas from the Detective Pulps in the ‘40s in book collections. And there are a lot of stories, so more Day Keene for us! Though I do wish Ramble would hire a decent copyeditor. But hey, at least the stories are becoming available again. Anyway, this particular quote is from the first volume, League of the Grateful Dead and Other Stories (and yeah, that’s where the band got its name), from a story with a memorable name: Crawl Out of that Coffin!

‘The D’Andrea’s don’t live to be twenty-one,’ he told me.

While I was considering that, he motioned our waiter to the table and told him to bring whatever we were drinking and a Rum Collins for himself.

The waiter looked at the passed-out girl.

‘No. Nothing for her,’ Pierce said straight-faced. ‘Miss D’Andrea is driving.’

–Day Keene, Crawl Out of that Coffin!

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