THE CROW FLIES CROOKED

by Jack Kisling ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 18, 1966

This is an offbeat, racy comedy of errors on the rural homefront and the plot, like that crow, wings a raucous and eccentric course through Crying Creek, Colorado. Tiny Elmore, runt of a ""woolhat,"" lifts some stacked up dynamite and plants it in Martin Abel's bean warehouse. Martin finds the sticks and keeps quiet, but Effie, Tiny's paramour, spills another kinds of beans to Rigg, the town's lawyer. He is engaged in other secret activities (an affair), and from then on through the culminating, brawling Pick 'n Hoe dance, a drunken celebration of spring, it's trigue and intrigue, legal deals, blackmail and bungling. Electric mousetraps trigger a mistake in the warehouse; flashbulbs catch an amorous slip; and $25,000 changes quite a few hands in a very few pages. . . The story is an inconsequential frolic in a backwoods town but Kisling does make people out of his characters. He has an amused and sympathetic attitude toward smalltime foibles; he is also a teller of tall tales, delighting in the oddly-turned incident. The dialogue is great, particularly the frequent double-talk conversations. A special kind of fun.

Pub Date: March 18, 1966

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: McKay

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1966

Categories: FICTION