Forgotten Books: The Best of Damon Runyon -- Damon Runyon, Edited by E. C. Bentley

I first learned about Damon Runyon from radio and a series called The Damon Runyon Theater. It wasn't like anything else we listened to back in 1949, and I thought it was great, not because of the stories themselves but because of the language. I guess that even as a grade-schooler, I was already aware of such things on some level, because the unique narration has stuck with me through many years. The radio show was just being true to the stories from which it was derived, though I didn't find that out until years later.

Here's an example of that narration, picked at random from a story called "Blood Pressure." The stories are all narrated in the first person by the same (I suppose) unnamed character. Sometimes he's just reporting; sometimes he has a role in the action, as in this case: "Now of course I do not wish to go to Nathan Detroit's crap game; and if I do wish to go there I do not wish to go with Rusty Charley, because a guy is sometimes judged by the company he keeps, especially around crap games, and Rusty Charley is apt to be considered bad company. Anyway, I do not have any dough to shoot craps with, and if I do have dough to shoot craps with, I will not shoot craps with it at all, but will bet it on Sun Beau, or maybe take it home and pay off some of the overhead around my joint, such as rent."

Great stuff, right? Well, I think so.

The collection of stories pictured here is a well-worn Armed Services Edition with a fine introduction by E. C. Bentley of Trent's Last Case fame. It contains at least one of the stories I remember from the radio show, "The Brain Goes Home." There might well be more. Doesn't matter, they're still fun and fresh and a pleasure for me to read. You might give one a try and see what you think, or you could go here and listen to one of the radio shows. Maybe you'll get as big a kick out of it as I did all those years ago.