I like a good tough guy piece. I like to wear credentials I haven’t earned—tough, sexy, stoic, snappy talker, snazzy dresser—I try these attributes on in a novel or a short story sometimes, usually when my wife isn’t around. I get self-conscious reading that kinda stuff in front of her. Sorta like being discovered preening in the mirror. Because, I’d like to really be like that. But I’m not. I never will be. Especially not when I’m older.
Geezer noir is a term I read off the cover of an anthology titled Damn Near Dead a few years ago and it gave me chills. Ooooh, tough oooold guys and gals. I like that. It was a new twist on one of my favorite flavors. (Waiting eagerly for Damn Near Dead 2)
I’d never call Stella Hardesty a geezer, though. And not just because she’d most likely kick my tail if I did. I wouldn’t do it, ‘cause she’s not. Sitting pretty at just north of the half-century mark, Stella’s still teaching hard lessons to the men of southern Missouri who abuse their women with extreme prejudice in Sophie Littlefield’s follow up to A Bad Day for Sorry, A Bad Day for Pretty. Watching Stella open up a can on some young dude not taking the “old lady the bat” seriously is a true pleasure, (seriously, somebody get Melissa Leo’s agent on the phone and let’s make a movie happen).
Two of my favorite tough old codgers, Milo Milodragovitch and C.W. Sughrue are the literary offspring of a real life stuff-of-legend writer James Crumley, (miss him a lot), who wrote a series for each of them, aging them in real time, so that when he wrote a title featuring both grizzled old coots, Bordersnakes, they were hard-ridden, gnarly strips of humanity who could still lay you out in a bar fight and proceed to drink the rest of the patrons under the table afterward. All the aches and pains they’d accrued over their careers didn’t slack their appetites for living. They were going hard along with Crumley to the very end.
Gunther Fahnstiel is the titular reference in Scott Phillips’ The Walkaway, who’s abandoned his room at the retirement home and is pushing through a bad case of dementia and a spotty memory to do… something important. He can’t quite remember. It may have something to do with the policeman tracking him down with questions about two unsolved murders from a half century earlier when Gunther was a cop himself. On the other hand, it could be in regards to another hastily and not too deeply buried secret from Christmas day 1979, (if you’ve read Phillips’ The Ice Harvest, you might have an idea what that one might be). Whatever it is, Gunther’s curmudgeonly determination is the spark of this one.
And on the where'd-it-go? front, a movie was made last year, (and I'm still waiting for the opportunity to see it), based on the title story from William Gay's short story collection I Hate To See That Evening Sun Go Down, starring Hal Holbrook as Abner Meecham, another retirement home abscondee come home to find his home rented out from under him by his son. Abner's escalating battle of wills with the new occupants reaches frightening levels. Gay has created some of my favorite literary old men including E.F. Bloodworth in Provinces of Night who's also getting the film treatment soon, (Kris Kristofferson in the role).
What other literary old-timers do you admire or at least enjoy?
Jedidiah Ayres writes fiction and keeps the blog Hardboiled Wonderland.
I loved L.A. Morse's "The Old Dick," an Edgar award winner, I think. I still laugh when I remember the opening scene, a chase that occurs in slow motion because the chaser and chasee are both (as one character puts it) "about a million years old." All of the PI's retired pals help him solve the mystery (e.g., friend retired from the phone company gets a younger current phone company person to release info, etc.) and no one suspects that a bunch of "old folks" could be up to anything. I wish this book would be re-released for the nook--I'd buy it. 
