For the few of you who can't read German - and if not, why not? -
the title of this issue is "A Bullet before Breakfast - a crime story with explosive punch"
You should've been a Buddhist monk; they don't change their robes either", exclaimed Padma, commenting on my having sat by the fireplace for three days running, reading books while wearing the same shirt and pullover and the same pair of oil- and paint-stained workpants.
And, just to emphasis the point she was trying to make ever so subtly, she added, "Why do you think Buddhist whorshippers keep a respectful distance from them at all times? It's not out of respect, you know!" When I read I enter a world devoid of soap, razor blades, and a fresh pair of socks. I live in the moment which may be as long as 500 pages.
I don't know when the presence of the printed matter, the power of words, the urge to read entered my life, but it was as soon as I had acquired the ability to read which was sometime before I started school. There are a few modern words which reflect the notion that knowledge, literate knowledge, is a form of magic. Our word grammar, for instance, shares the same root as glamour, both derived from an early word that means magic. And isn't it magic that by means of a mere twenty-six symbols, our alphabet from A to Z, we can express all manners of feelings, our most complex thoughts, all our knowledge?
I was never one who read under the bedcovers by flashlight, or who had the book snatched from his hands at the dinner table, but I've always loved to read. Quite soon I was no longer satisfied with "The Bremen Town Musicians" but still too young to understand, and unable to afford, books by Heinrich Böll (The Train Was on Time) or Günter Grass (The Tin Drum) or Erich Maria Remarque (All Quiet on the Western front).
Instead - and before I was old enough to join the communal library - I frequented a small "book exchange" where for a "Groschen" I could buy dog-eared copies of "G-man Jerry Cotton", a long series of trashy pulp magazine-type crime novels which even when new, sold for a mere 60 Pfennigs at any one of the hundreds of kiosks that stocked them.
"Mord in Chinatown - Another Cotton story that packs a punch"
For more titles, click here
I had forgotten about G-man Jerry Cotton - and had never known that "G-Man" stood for "Government man" or FBI agent - when, decades ago, I came down from Port Moresby to Cairns where I found in a sidestreet just off the Esplanade a second-hand shop which stocked a whole big bundle of G-man Jerry Cotton magazines, all in German and all covered in dust. I would've bought the lot for sentimental reasons but I was on my way to my next employment on Thursday Island and travelling light.
Fast forward several more decades and I've just discovered that those bits of printed matter, which were the first rung on the ladder to my becoming a bibliophile, were made into movies in German at about the same time as I was watching "Homicide" in Barton House in Canberra.
Yes, they were pulp but for me they first created that exotic space of reading where the mind is enflamed and the body in repose. G-Man Jerry Cotton will always remind me where I was and who I was when I read them: a little boy in Germany intoxicated by the printed word.
Now it's time for me to get out of that exotic space and enter the cold space of the bathroom for a shower and a shave and a change of new clothes before Padma keeps an even more respectful distance from me.
