Thursday, April 6, 2023

Meet the author

There's a book I'm reading now, a detective novel. I'm enjoying it, but I'm still a little less than halfway through it, so I can't really give much of a verdict on it, which is also why I haven't named it yet. May do both later.

I can comment on the author photo, though. It shows the author with a voluminous yet trim mustache, wearing a very vintage suit. It's probably an attempt to look like William Faulkner, but also makes me think of Jay Gatsby if he were played by a young Dennis Farina. Interesting and different, then.

2 comments:

susan said...

Does this mean I must guess? My first thought was Hercule Poirot but, although he was noted as having an impressive moustache, he was a character rather than a writer.

Since it's a detective novel that leaves out a number of authors who might otherwise fit the lip hair requirement: Kipling, Orwell, or Nietzsche, none of whom wrote detective fiction. Then I thought of Doyle and Poe, both of whom had moustaches and wrote detective stories, but I get the feeling it's a more contemporary author you've been reading.

I guess I'll have to wait for the big reveal when the time is ripe.

Ben said...

Yeah, Agatha Christie didn't have much of a mustache in any of the pictures I've seen of her. How much waxing/bleaching she did is not known to me.

Of course I've made the reveal by this point, both on the blog and in conversation. The pictures seems to be only on the jacket of the edition of this novel I got from the library. Which is to say that I haven't seen it reproduced online either. We expect the internet to be this electronic archive of everything that exists in the world, but of course it can't live up to those expectations. Probably nothing could.