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Please go to Paul Theroux.com's new site, Paul TherouxFree Computer Help Forum Murder in Mount
Holly is set at that time
in American history when Lyndon Johnson was having trouble with his
gall bladder. It was incidentally the same time that Herbie Gneiss was
forced to leave college and made to work at the Kant-Brake toy factory
(manufacturers of war toys for children) in order to keep his
fifteen-stone widowed mother from starvation. Mr. Gibbon, veteran of
three wars, also works at Kant-Brake; when Herbie is drafted into the
army, Mr. Gibbon falls in love with Herbie’s mother and persuades her
to live with him in Miss Ball’s rooming house. Because Herbie is
fighting nobly for his country, Mr. Gibbon feels that he, Miss Ball
and Mrs. Gneiss should do something patriotic as well. They decide to
rob the Mount Holly Trust Company because it is managed by a small
dark man who is ... probably a communist. There are complications:
Miss Ball’s Puerto Rican lover, Juan (“Warren”); Mrs. Gneiss’s
inertia; several necessary murders; Herbie’s death in action; and, of
course, the difficulty of three people over sixty executing a daylight
bank robbery. But none of these complications prevents the old
threesome from seeing their mission through to the end. They triumph,
striking a blow for old age and for ... America, proving the words of
two commentators on the American scene, the poet e. e. cummings, who
said “The pigpen is mightier than the sword,” and the militant H. Rap
Brown, who will be remembered for saying, “Violence is as American as
cherry pie.” |
