Kaddish and crime fiction

The book opens like this:

"Everything struck hard."

and continues like this:

"The door slamming behind me in the black car. The shovel stabbing the mound of soil. The wooden box hitting the floor of the pit."

Tell me that first sentence, from its substance to its abrupt staccato rhythm, doesn't scream hard-boiled, and not just hard-boiled, but good hard-boiled. Maybe that's why a review quoted on the book's cover calls it "A detective story of the spirit."

But the book is Leon Wieseltier's Kaddish, a meditation on and investigation of the Jewish prayer of mourning.

(Go here for a graveside invocation of the Kaddish and crime fiction at a memorial for David Goodis. )

© Peter Rozovsky 2011