Sam Kitchener
Paper Trails
A young City worker tells detectives that he has been shot by somebody in a vintage car; but the first person to find the victim remembers him describing the car as ‘ochre’:
– Ochre?
– Ochre.
– Are you sure?
– Yes.
Hawthorn looked at Child. He was grinning.
– Do you think he might have said old car?
– Old car?
– Old car.
The eponymous detectives in Keith Ridgway’s Hawthorn & Child spend much of the novel negotiating these tangles of language. Which ought to be discouraging. The banal poetry of that dialogue, with its mutating repetitions, seem old-fashioned – cod Beckett or, worse, Pinteresque: an antique example of a particular sort of
Sign Up to our newsletter
Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.@Lit_Review
Follow Literary Review on Twitter
'It’s long been known that there is an optimum reproductive window and that women enjoy a considerably shorter one than men. For both sexes this window is opening and closing earlier than it used to.' (£)
https://literaryreview.co.uk/the-end-of-babies
Sixty years ago today, the Russian cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin became the first human to enter outer space. @Andrew_Crumey looks at his role in the space race.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/one-giant-leap-for-mankind
On the night of 5th July 1809, a group of soldiers kidnapped Pope Pius VII on the orders of Napoleon Bonaparte. Munro Price looks at what happened next.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/bonaparte-meets-his-match