Reading Jackie Corley’s collection The Suburban Swindle, there was something familiar about the voice I couldn’t place until this passage from “The Smoker in Winter”^*:

I wait out in the car for a minute, light another Camel. I’m thinking of how he’s spent his year. Me? I’d logged time in one other bed, but it wasn’t much of anything. Some reporter running a city hall beat in Manhattan. Another creature like me—all words; no bones; cold, useless skin. A voice without a proper body. Nothing like my bouncer boy.

It’s the voice of Dashiell Hammett’s hardboiled detective, standing around on a stakeout and waiting for something to happen. Corley’s characters are often caught waiting for stagnant lives to change, as dependent upon that change being external as detectives are. They’re like detectives staking themselves out and finding nothing to watch, no more able to change their own lives than The Continental Op can make a suspect appear at the moment he most wants one to.

* Read the story here, but buy the book, too.