Dave's Fiction Warehouse

A hole in the very fabric of time D uring these uncertain times, you may find yourself borrowing jigsaw puzzles. I hate to borrow anything, but I don’t own any puzzles, and looking online I see that pretty much anything rated age 6 and above is back-ordered to around 2025. Some neighbors were nice enough to loan us a few. We worked on them for days, only to find at the end that pieces were missing. This grates at my soul, of course, but it also creates an ethical dilemma. Should I inform each owner of the missing pieces when I return the puzzles? The problem with this approach is that it might suggest that I am either mighty choosy for a beggar, or that I am ungrateful for the loan. Also, it might create the suspicion that I myself lost the piece in a drunken stupor and am seeking to evade responsibility. I’ve also considered returning the puzzles without mentioning the missing pieces. Few people are likely to reassemble their own puzzles any time soon and thus they’ll be unlikely to n...

O ne little-discussed provision of the pandemic relief bill is that all ad copy and commentary must begin with the words “during these uncertain times.” So. During these uncertain times, I’ve been reading a lot of Agatha Christie. I got the idea after my favorite podcast host, Phoebe Judge, decided to read a chapter a day of Christie’s first book, “The Mysterious Affair at Styles.” I’d read most of Christie’s work in my teens and 20s, but I hadn’t read this one. And I’ve been a fan of Phoebe Judge’s “Criminal” podcast for the last few years. Something about an old-fashioned drawing-room mystery delivered in Phoebe’s lovely, measured tones: It’s a comfort. You know, during these uncertain times.  Agatha Christie was at the height of her powers between the end of the Great War and the start of the Cold one. Then her distinctive style — the intricate plots, the clever dialog, the overabundance of red herrings — gave way to a wave of gritty noir populated mainly by mobsters, psychopath...

W e’re about a month into this now. Amazing what you get used to. Amazing what’s changed and what hasn’t. We’re still eating pretty well. (Thanks, WalMart Pickup!) We still go for walks and enjoy the good weather. We got through the wretched Tiger King, but still have a long queue of books and Netflix recommendations from equally bored friends and family. We’ve still got Zoom, with all its dropped audio and hilariously frozen screens. For the wife and I, the only pandemic-related injuries are the ones sustained from biting our tongues when the other does something dumb or annoying. Maybe a little uptick there. Such is life under lockdown. For us, at least, the real casualties of COVID-19 do not yet include people we know personally. Knock wood. They say the next couple of weeks may be the worst. That’s when all the folks who were partying and playing grab-ass long past the early-March warnings may find out firsthand if this is Rush Limbaugh’s “common cold” or something more dire. To pa...