A “fortunate cookie,” I’ve just decided, is an on-topic fortune cookie. Terry’s “Almanac” entries, as you already know if you’ve been paying attention, are very often related, more or less subtly, to something else that one of us has posted lately. My fortune cookies, in contrast, tend to be randomly seized upon.
This weekend, however, I had my nose buried in one of Reginald Hill’s beguiling Dalziel and Pascoe mysteries (my undying gratitude to the Weisses for putting me onto these), and I jotted down several nice bits. One of them popped straight to mind when I read this rather withering reader comment in Terry’s post-Index Mailbox: “The Searchers or Rio Bravo? Neither. Trite male weepies the both of them.”
Here’s the serendipitous cookie:
“Her camera appeared to require as little reloading as one of those guns the good cowboys used to have in the pre-psychological westerns.”
Reginald Hill, An April Shroud