Harold Adams and James Lileks

Reading Lileks today makes me wonder--not for the first time--whether he's ever read Harold Adams, a mystery writer who sets his stories in depression-era South Dakota.

The mysteries in these books are secondary to the characters and the atmosphere. Not that Adams wastes much time on description, most of the books are less than 200 pages long, he just has an uncanny knack for creating a place. And his leading character, Carl Wilcox, an itinerant sign painter, some-time private eye and black sheep of his respectable small-town family, is a treat.

Anyway this passage in today's Bleat reminded me of Adams:

“Your grandfather went to town to hire a man, and he talked to Eli, down at the hall, and Eli, he didn’t say anything. He never said anything. So Victor just went on to see if he could find someone else, then he went back to the farm. The next morning, there was Eli sitting on the steps. He’d walked in from town.”
...

He kept to himself, my dad said; he spoke to no one. Once a week he’d walk into Harwood - a mile or two – and sit in the store for a few hours. (Yes, the general store.) Then he’d walk home. That was his weekend in town. He spent nothing and read nothing and owned nothing; he worked, ate, and he slept, and whatever thoughts he had at night after he put out the light never made it past his lips. From what they knew, he fought in the Great War, went back to Wisconsin, worked in the mills, then drifted west again, and for some reason snagged his sleeve on Fargo, where my Grandfather found him.

Eli is a character straight out of Harold Adams territory.