Richard Smyth writes:
Every Christmas story should feature hitmen, hard liquor and close-harmony singing. Well, maybe not every Christmas story (though it would certainly liven up panto season) – but Damon Runyon’s Dancing Dan’s Christmas wouldn’t be half the story it is without these essential elements.
I defy you to read the opening of Dancing Dan’s Christmas without developing quite a strong conviction that a hot Tom and Jerry would really hit the spot just now. I defy you to read the first page without laughing. I defy you to read the whole thing without falling head-over-heels in love with Damon Runyon, and, what is more, feeling practically a hundred percent full of the Christmas spirit, at that.
Runyon had a newspaperman’s knack for throwing together street-talk and sentimentality and making them strike sparks. The plot of Dancing Dan’s Christmas is tinsel-light – it might be a children’s story, if it weren’t for the speakeasy, the drunk dressed as Santa, the two-timing moll, the five-hundred-G jewel heist, and the mob hitmen waiting outside with sawn-off shotguns and orders not to miss.
Runyon’s Broadway is a broad (and hilarious) caricature, of course. But still, the bullets here do real damage, the gangsters shoot to kill, and for every soft-hearted gesture – and there’s a lot of soft-hearted gestures – there’s a guy with his ear shot off or a mob boss dying in an empty tenement.
It’s a pretty cold world, but you still feel the warmth of Good Time Charley Bernstein’s speakeasy. You still want to join in on the chorus of ‘Will You Love Me in December, As You Do in May?’. This is a funny night in a tough city. You wish the guys well – in the end, with Shotgun Sam (even if he is a very obnoxious character indeed), you say, well, all right – Merry Christmas.
You can read Dancing Dan's Christmas at this link: http://www.informalmusic.com/Runyon/dancingdan.html
About the Author:
Richard Smyth is a writer and journalist. He is the author of the history books Bum Fodder: An Absorbing History Of Toilet Paper and Bloody British History: Leeds and of the title story in the new Fiction Desk anthology Crying Just Like Anybody. His short fiction has also appeared in .Cent, The Stinging Fly, Vintage Script and Spilling Ink Review.
Stories written: "Lie There, My Art" (read by Greg Page), "Legerdemain"(read by Greg Page), "The Miller's Tale" (read by Paul Clarke), "This Isn't Heat" (read by Silas Hawkins), "In the Shadow of the High Gable" (read by Katy Darby), "Something Wicked" (read by Tony Bell), "The Work Is Not God's" (read by Steven Bellamy), "Love Says Truth" (read by Patsy Prince),"Saint Theresa" (read by Susan Crothers), "Heriot" (read by Silas Hawkins), "Paternoster" (read by Peter Noble), "What I Am Without" (read by Adam Diggle)
Comments