reviewed by Sandra Seamans
When I read a story by a highly acclaimed author, I tend to have higher expectations. As I read this story, I kept wondering why isn’t she jumping on this, why’d she drop that, then finally, I just threw up my hands as I realized she seemed to be grabbing at every cliché in the book. Of course in 1979, they might not have been considered clichés. One reason to keep the date a story was written in mind while reading. Times change, and the writing with it.
The story starts off with a grand beginning. “Edward ‘Skip’ Skipperton spent most of his life feeling angry. It was his nature.”. We see how he uses that anger to get the things he wants. We’re shown that the man is a fighter, and in the end he should have drawn on that anger to fight his way out of the final situation, but he didn’t, he just gave up. And with his final act, the reader is left with multiple loose ends that could have been woven into the story if the author had taken the time to let the story unfold naturally.
After reading this story I wondered why “Slowly, Slowly, In the Wind” was even included in a book of noir stories because there’s nothing dark about this story. Reading through the table of contents it occurred to me that they needed a few women and Highsmith’s novels are considered noir.
Out of thirty-nine stories only three were written by women. Besides, Highsmith, they’ve included stories by Dorothy B. Hughes and Joyce Carol Oates. For me the glaring omission is Flannery O’Connor whose stories reek of that screwed darkness that defines noir. And for woman’s noir, one of the earliest would be Susan Glaspell’s, “A Jury of Her Peers” from 1917.
But the stories weren’t mine to choose and narrowing the field from a century of noir can’t have been an easy task.
Sandra Seamans is an acclaimed short story writer.
Sandra,
It’s funny, I thought many of the same things you did. For me, I found the brief bio & background info on Highsmith that appeared just before her short story very fascinating. I was unaware that her mother tried to abort her by drinking turpentine; can you imagine the void there would have been in the crime fiction/noir community had her mother succeeded? Also, I loved learning the inspiration for the title: an aide to then-president Richard M. Nixon said that he’d like to see an certain enemy twisting slowly, slowly in the wind. Great stuff!
I love Highsmith but I don’t know this story. She’s a bit of a slow burner as a novelist so maybe that’s why this story didn’t work ?I have read a couple of her short stories but I can’t really remember them, though that’s not a criticism of her!
It’s always fun to read where a writer gets the inspiration for a story, Kathleen! As I was reading this story though, I kept flashing on all the scarecrow movies that I’ve seen, so was expecting a much more powerful story than this one turned out to be. But then I wondered if perhaps they used her story to build their own, to tie up all those loose ends. Funny, how a story can make your mind work.
That’s a very good possibility, Paul, though this short moves right along, she just didn’t tie up the loose ends enough to satisfy me. Personal preference, I guess