... when I read this passage in Gavin Lambert's short story, "The Slide Area":She scratches her nose with a jewelled and freckled finger. "Are you sure you haven't read The Case of the Black-Eyed Blonde?"
"Absolutely."
"Then I shall have to take it on trust. With an opening paragraph like that I think..." She breaks off vaguely, fumbling in her crocodile bag and giving the assistant a quarter.
The assistant says: "Thirty-five cents, please."
She takes an alarmed step backwards. "You mean it's one of the expensive ones?"
"It's thirty-five cents."
The Countess replaces the book in the Westerns rack. "Much too expensive," she says firmly, "when no one knows if it's really good. I adore pulp literature but one must retain one's sense of values. Where is your selection of twenty-five cent crime novels, please?"
Reprinted in David L. Ulin's Writing Los Angeles: A Literary Anthology (Library of America, 2002).
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