List of Stories and Plots
The stories in the collection are:
- No Comebacks
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- A rich man who can have anything he wants, finally encounters a woman he wants but can't have. She's married to a husband who needs her so long as he's alive. But for a man with money and no scrupples, there's an obvious fix for that.
- There are no Snakes in Ireland
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- An East Indian medical student takes a job on a tough Irish wrecking crew for money, and is mistreated by a racist boss. His revenge is so complex that something is bound to go wrong with it.
- The Emperor
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- In this homage to Hemingway, an ineffectual tourist named Murgatroyd (instead of Macomber) battles a monster blue marlin, and finds something besides pain.
- There Are Some Days...
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- A hapless crew of Irish trucking hijackers finds themselves with an odiferous load of rose fertilizer instead of fine brandy. But their troubles have only begun.
- Money with Menaces
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- A milquetoast senior insurance company officer finds himself being neatly blackmailed for the first sexual misadventure of his life. Surely he has no choice but to pay...
- Used in Evidence
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- A man's fight against eviction from the condemned house where he has lived alone since his wife disappeared 15 years before, becomes more understandable when the mummified cadaver of a woman is found bricked up between the wall and chimney breast of his fireplace. In such an open-and-shut case, why won't he even say a word?
- Privilege
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- When a businessman finds himself libeled by a careless journalist, it seems there's little he can do about it that won't bankrupt him. If only the law in such matters had any part that was equitable to all.
- Duty
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- A couple vacationing in France in the 1950's finds a ghost of Irish history.
- A Careful Man
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- Mr. Timothy Hanson is a self-made man with a terminal cancer. If he hates his only surviving relative as much as he hates the death tax, why does his last will specify that the woman and her husband get his entire estate, if only both of them will personally push the lead coffin containing Hanson's body, off a boat into the deep waters of the Atlantic?
- Sharp Practice
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- In the unsophisticated world of 1938, a deck of marked cards used in a game of poker on a train might be just what it seems, or not.
Read more about this topic: No Comebacks
Famous quotes containing the words list of, list, stories and/or plots:
“Religious literature has eminent examples, and if we run over our private list of poets, critics, philanthropists and philosophers, we shall find them infected with this dropsy and elephantiasis, which we ought to have tapped.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“We saw the machinery where murderers are now executed. Seven have been executed. The plan is better than the old one. It is quietly done. Only a few, at the most about thirty or forty, can witness [an execution]. It excites nobody outside of the list permitted to attend. I think the time for capital punishment has passed. I would abolish it. But while it lasts this is the best mode.”
—Rutherford Birchard Hayes (1822–1893)
“The return of the asymmetrical Saturday was one of those small events that were interior, local, almost civic and which, in tranquil lives and closed societies, create a sort of national bond and become the favorite theme of conversation, of jokes and of stories exaggerated with pleasure: it would have been a ready- made seed for a legendary cycle, had any of us leanings toward the epic.”
—Marcel Proust (1871–1922)
“‘O opportunity! thy guilt is great,
‘Tis thou that execut’st the traitor’s treason;
Thou set’st the wolf where he the lamb may get;
Whoever plots the sin, thou point’st the season;
‘Tis thou that spurn’st at right, at law, at reason;
And in thy shady cell, where none may spy him,
Sits Sin to seize the souls that wander by him.”
—William Shakespeare (1564–1616)