Header Ads Widget

Ticker

6/recent/ticker-posts

A grace note: What song has the best crime-fiction line?

Here's one more ornament to last week's Crime songs post. Your task there was to suggest songs that would make good crime stories. Someone (well, two people, including me) cited Elvis Costello's "Watching the Detectives" for this chilling line: "She's filing her nails while they're dragging the lake." That line is a story in itself or at least the germ of one. What other lines from songs pack that kind of condensed narrative punch?

UPDATE: Here's another crime song: Bob Dylan's "Lily, Rosemary and the Jack of Hearts," about simultaneous bank robbery and romantic exhaustion and betrayal:

"Two doors down the boys finally made it through the wall
And cleaned out the bank safe, it's said that they got off with quite a haul.
In the darkness by the riverbed they waited on the ground
For one more member who had business back in town.
But they couldn't go no further without the Jack of Hearts."

Wikipedia says the song has inspired two screenplays, so I'm not the only one who thinks the song makes a good story.

© Peter Rozovsky 2008

Yorum Gönder

0 Yorumlar