Chet The Dog

Posts Tagged ‘Peter Abrahams’

Moi

Since this website was came up yesterday in the FB comments, I’ll link to it today in case it’s of more general interest:

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Song For Chet

We’ve been asked to post the lyrics to Song For Chet. Here they are. The music is by Mitch Watkins, who co-produced with Robert Edwards. Andrea House is the singer and Gene Elders plays the lovely fiddle solo. Words by Peter Abrahams.

You’re the kind that runs around

Can’t stop to think until the ship has sailed

Till the milk is spilled, till the safe is blown

Till the day is done and we’re all alone.

 

If they were all like you, would there be darkness?

If they were all like you, would there be pain?

If they were all like you, would there be teardrops?

If they were all like you.

 

When I come undone, you are the one

Who gives me hope, who brings the sun

Your big brown eyes say this each day

I’ll always love you, any way.

 

If they were all like you, then those tears don’t flow

And though the pain may come, it will always go

If they were all like you.

 

And I’m the kind that loves you back

From here and now on down the track

To sunset, where the birds are flown

And the day is done and we’re all alone.

 

If they were all like you

If they were all like you.

Beginnings (More)

On Sundays we’ve been doing beginnings – all the Peter Abrahams books in chronological order, including those written under the Spencer Quinn pen name. Here from 2013 – #31, THE SOUND AND THE FURRY, sixth in the Chet and Bernie series (and first one on their road trip). We had a reader contest for the title – all the readers were told was that it was a southern novel.

[“Spencer Quinn’s masterful job of having a canine narrator isn’t cutesy, nor does it grow tiresome, a tribute to his wordsmithing.”
– New York Journal of Books]

“One thing’s for sure,” the lawyer said, handing Bernie our check, “you earned every cent.”

Bernie tucked the check in – oh, no – the chest pocket of his Hawaiian shirt, just about his nicest Hawaiian shirt, with the hula dancers and the trombones, but that wasn’t the point. The point was we’d had chest pocket problems in the past, more than once. And possibly more than twice, but I wouldn’t know, since I don’t count past two. What I do know is that checks have a way of falling out of chest pockets.

“What’s he barking about?” the lawyer said.

Bernie glanced at me. “Just wants to get rolling,” he said. That wasn’t it at all: what I wanted was for Bernie to put that check in his front pants pocket where it would be safe. But then I realized that I did kind of want to get rolling. Wow! That was Bernie, knowing my own mind better than I did. And I knew his exactly the same way!

Beginnings (More)

On Sundays we’ve been doing beginnings – all the Peter Abrahams books in chronological order, including those written under the Spencer Quinn pen name. Here from 2010 – #23, BULLET POINT, a YA novel with hardboiled roots.

[“Gutsier and sexier than most YA novels dare, Abrahams’s thriller wrenches guts with a Richard Price-like facility. Readers will be as irretrievably drawn in as Wyatt.”
– Daniel Kraus, Booklist Starred Review]

Times were bad. Baker Brothers Iron and Metal Foundry went bankrupt. They fired everybody, including Rusty Halenka, who’d worked the seven-to-five on the main furnace for fourteen years. That meant he was around the house a lot. Rusty was Wyatt Lathem’s stepdad. They hadn’t gotten along when times were good.