Monday, November 6, 2017

Calvin Trillin, Killings ****

Killings is a collection of short pieces, originally published in The New Yorker during the late 1970s and early 1980s, about regular Americans who suffered a sudden death. A Kentucky landowner shoots a documentarian filming on his property; a Native American activist attempts to kidnap the mayor; a successful Iowa farmer (probably) kills his wife after starting a late-in-life affair.

Trillin packs a lot into fifteen or so pages. Each story has all of the elements you might expect in a novel. Many of them are more why-dunit than who-dunit, and Trillin is more interested in what the killings and their aftermath tell us about the communities than in the details of the killing itself. Solid bite-sized portraits of 1980s America, and fantastic source material for any writer looking for inspiration for a crime novel.

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