Chet The Dog

Posts Tagged ‘Armand Assante’

Beginnings

Sunday is when we do beginnings, taking a look at the start of a Peter Abrahams novel, including those written under the Spencer Quinn moniker™. Since the Chet and Bernie novel A Fistful of Collars came up yesterday, how about we feature it today? It’s one of my few novels where Hollywood is a factor. The only others I can think of are Revolution #9 – where a character appears on Jeopardy – and Oblivion, where a TV movie is made of the case that made Nick Petrov, a PI and the main character, famous. Armand Assante was cast as Nick. (There’s fun to be had in the little corners of this business.) Here’s the beginning of A Fistful of Collars:

“Heard you drove another one off a cliff,” said Nixon Panero. He spat a thin brown stream of chewing tobacco into an empty paint can, or maybe not that empty. Yellow paint, the yellow of egg yolks, now with a brown swirl in the middle: there’s all kinds of beauty in life.

“You heard wrong,” said Bernie.