SleuthSayers
Professional Crime-Writers and Crime-Fighters
22 November 2012
"the unicorn in the garden", or god bless you, mr. thurber, 11 comments:.
Thurber along with Thorne Smith were among the top of my father's favorite writers and my mother thoroughly enjoyed Benchley. I'm doomed.
"The Unicorn in the Garden" was one of my favorite stories in childhood. Thanks for bringing it back to me and for the delightful quotes. Have a Happier Thanksgiving this year!
A treat! Happy Thanksgiving!
What a delightful nostalgic treat! I'd completely forgotten the story, though I think about "The Catbird Seat" every time I see a catbird perched in the crotch of two upper branches in the backyard. I'd also forgotten that there was a copy of The Thurber Carnival in our house when I was a kid. Happy Thanksgiving to my blog sisters and brothers on SleuthSayers and all our readers!
I love both Benchley and Thurber. "The Catbird Seat" may be the best perfect crime story ever written, says me, and of course I edited THURBER ON CRIME, so I would say it.
I enjoy Thurber but unfortunately I've never read Benchley. I first read Thurber in my freshman year in college and tried over the years to learn from his prose style. My favorite story is "A Visit From Saint Nicholas in the Ernest Hemingway Manne,r" his parody of Hemingway.
A delight! Thanks! Happy Thanksgiving!
Elizabeth and Louis, thanks for reminding me of those. I hope you had a great Thanksgiving, Jeff!
There are probably multiple connections between Thurber and Benchley, but in a 1944 radio adaptation on This Is My Best, Robert Benchley played the daydreaming titular character in Thurber's "The Secret Life of Walter Mitty".
Some people say that Benchley WAS Walter Mitty - he and Dorthy Parker used to share an office at the New Yorker - Dorothy said if it was any smaller, "it would have been adultery." Check out some of the old Benchley shorts on YouTube. Very funny man. And I agree, "The Catbird Seat" is the perfect crime. I'm going to have to get a hold of "Thurber on Crime" - one of my seminal writing moments as a child was "The Macbeth Murder Mystery"! Oh, and I have much happier Thanksgivings nowadays. :)
Benchley hit his prime about ten years before Thurber. The latter said that when he and EB White shared an office at The New Yorker every time one of them wrote something funny, he would show it to the other one and ask "Did Benchley do this already?" Certainly Benchley was a master of the "little man" persona that Thurber is now associated with. I am pretty sure that Parker and Benchley shared an office long before The New Yorker. The other famous line about that was their claim that they shared an international telegram address: PARKBENCH.
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