"Robert Rankin - Waiting for Godalming" - читать интересную книгу автора (Robert Rankin)

Camel-smoking, lone-walking, smart-talking, pistol-packing,
broad-smacking, mean-fighting, hot-pastrami-biting, tricky-case-
solving son-of-a-goddamn-prince-among-men, then knock at the
door and walk right in and ask for me by name.
And the name to ask for is Woodbine. As if you hadn't guessed.
Lazlo Woodbine, Private Eye.
Some call me Laz.
You see me, I keep it classic and I keep it simple.
I work just the four locations. An office where my clients come. A
bar where I talk a load of old toot and where the dame that does
me wrong bops me on the head at the beginning of the case. An
alleyway, where I get into tricky situations, and a rooftop where I
have my final confrontation with the villain.
No spin-offs, no loose ends and all strictly in the first person. No
great genre detective ever needed more than that and no
detective ever came greater than me.
So, with that said, and pretty goddamn well said too, let's get us
down to the business in hand and begin it the way that it always
begins.
And it always begins like this.

It was another long hot Manhattan night and I was sitting in
Fangio's, chewing the fat with the fat boy. The fat boy's name
was Fangio, but the fat we chewed went nameless.
It had been a real lean year for me and I hadn't had a case to
solve with style since the big one of '98. Times were getting
tough.
It's all well and good being hailed as "the detective's detective",
and having your craggy silhouette on the cover of Newsweek
magazine and your office featured in Hello!, but fame won't buy
you a ticket to ride if you don't have the fare for the ferryman.
At the present, I was down.
My bank account was redder than a masochist's butt and the
trench had washed out of my trenchcoat. The trusty Smith and
Wesney Snipes was gathering rust in Papa Legba's pawnshop and
my now legendary snap-brim seemed to suit my landlord who
had taken it in lieu of last month's rent.
I was down.
Down. Down.
Deeper and down.
I was deeper and down than a pit lad's purse in a pocket of
Pleistocene pumice. More at sea than a Lascar's lunch on a
leaking Liberian lugger. Further south than a tired Tasmanian's
toe-jam tucker-bag take-away.
But hey, when you're deeper and down as that, my friends, the
only way is up. You can't just sit there on your sorry ass, waiting
for the wind of fortune to blow in your direction.
You have to lift yourself high above adversity.
You have to make your own wind.