I am sitting in Mindy's....

            For reasons I do not know, I am, previous to the last few days, not a reader of Damon Runyon. This is clearly my loss. But I am happy to report that the situation is being rectified.

The literary agent Sheldon Abend somehow acquired the rights to a whole lot of Runyon’s stories in 1992 and Guys & Dolls: The Stories of Damon Runyon (1997) reprints thirty-two of them, originally published in popular American magazines between 1929 and 1944, here with an introduction by William Kennedy. The narrator of the stories is never named and speaks a peculiar variety of American English that has ever since been called Runyonese. He does not use contractions, favors the present and present progressive tenses (“I am sitting in Mindy’s Restaurant on Broadway”), and uses slang sparingly: guns are “rods” and “Roscoes,” to look is to “glaum” or to “lamp,” card sharks are “mechanics,” and Broadway itself is “the stem.” The narrator uses understatement and litotes, the explicit statement of the obvious, and certain phrases that are repeated “more than somewhat.” People are “citizens,” and of course, men and women are “guys and dolls.”

            The stories are urban underworld tall tales, and their characters form a society that was never seen on Broadway or any other street. Some of the stories are farcical: Tobias Tweeney becomes terrible twelve-gun Tweeney when the guys the narrator takes him to meet load him up with their Roscoes in a raid. In another story Big Butch takes the baby along to blow a safe, and a police sergeant gives him a tip about cutting teeth. There is no lack of the sentimental, as when the gambler named Sky bets everything against a soul, loses, but comes up a winner. Some of the stories strain credibility more than others: “The Hottest Guy in the World,” is Big Jule, recently released from prison, who’s lost his girl to his childhood friend, the cop Johnny Brannigan. Johnny saves Jule from arrest when Jule kills a gorilla threatening Johnny’s baby, King Kong style, in a story that predates King Kong by three years. “Madame La Gimp” is a classic situation comedy in which Dave the Dude arranges for Madame an elaborate party to fool her daughter and fiancé into thinking her life really matches the letters she’s been sending her daughter for years. “The Bloodhounds of Broadway,” transplanted from Georgia, trace Regret the horseplayer, but it turns out he did not shoot Marvin Clay the jerk, but his companion Miss Lovey Lou did. Runyon likes that twist to the end of the story, and has obvious debts to Henry, Twain, and Lardner. Rusty Charley takes the narrator for a night on the town, but Rusty’s wife proves to be the better man, and the adventure has the unexpected effect of curing the narrator’s blood pressure. The story that “Dream Street Rose” tells about her “friend” in Colorado who is pimped by her husband and takes revenge on him turns out to be true.