troisoiseaux

Finished the Damon Runyon collection Guys and Dolls and Other Writings! To be honest, I mostly skimmed through his Early/Other Fiction, which lacked a certain something (like... good writing...), but at least his much better Broadway Stories made up like 70% of the collection, and his 1920s-30s trial reporting— including coverage of Al Capone's 1931 trial for tax evasion and the 1933 Senate investigation of J.P. Morgan Jr., also for tax evasion, presented back-to-back— was also interesting; it, along with some of his Occasional Prose, offered a bit of insight into his Broadway Stories: the "Mindy's restaurant" that often appears in his stories is presumably a nod to the "Lindy's restaurant" mentioned in the context of the 1929 murder of gangster Arnold Rothstein... who, per a short Wikipedia rabbit hole, appears as "the Brain" in several of Runyon's short stories— and has also been pointed to as his inspiration for Nathan Detroit?— and also shows up in The Great Gatsby as Meyer Wolfsheim. The more you know! My one nit to pick with this collection was that it presented the stories without date/context, but it turns out all of this information was included in an "annotations" section at the end, so complaint retracted. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯