Sam Leith
The Day the Music Died
In 1929, in the tiny town of West Table in the Missouri Ozarks, an explosion in the Arbor Dance Hall saw 42 people killed – ‘perished in an instant, waltzing couples murdered midstep, blown towards the clouds in a pink mist chased by towering flames’. What actually caused the explosion was never established.
Myth has woven its tendrils around the story. For example, in 1989 it was claimed that the town’s memorial – a black marble angel standing over a mass grave – was itself seen dancing, a notion that attracts goths and hippies and loons to a vigil. In 1965, as a child, Daniel Woodrell’s narrator Aleks went to stay with his grandmother Alma and heard some of her theories. Her sister Ruby, mistress to the town’s banker Arthur Glencross, perished in the blast and Alma is convinced of his culpability.
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
'Unlike much that was extracted from India, these paintings were not plunder, and those who created them were properly remunerated and often received due credit.'
@PParkerWriting on 'Forgotten Masters: Indian Painting for the East India Company'.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/artists-for-hire
‘"I feel", Lowell told Hardwick ... "as if I were pulled apart and thinning into mist, or rather being torn apart and still preferring that state to making a decision."'
Richard Davenport-Hines on the letters of Robert Lowell and Elizabeth Hardwick.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/yours-unfaithfully-2
'To me, Elmore Leonard is as comforting in extremity as Pym, and as safe, in the last resort, as Wodehouse. The guys with the best lines are going to come out the other side; the dumb fucks are going to get it in the head or chest.'
https://literaryreview.co.uk/a-spoonful-of-elmore