Katze mit Wut

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The Nine Mile Walk is a famous short story that introduces Harry Kemelman's armchair detective Nicky Welt. Kemelman also wrote the popular rabbi series (Friday the rabbi slept late etc.) a few of which I chanced upon as audio dramas. These had been produced in German for some German station and were not very good I'm afraid, but they reminded me to check whether I could get a lock on the Nicky Welt stories which had been hard to come by for a while and, I'm happy to say, this time Amazon used & new did provide. Trying to hype the stories to others, I first tried youtube and to my surprise, somebody had actually turned 9 mile walk into a short almost word for word (see above). The result, while not blow-away like, say, Batman: Dead End, still serves quite nicely. In the story, the line A nine-mile walk is no joke, especially in the rain is accidentally overheard by two men who then proceed to show that a murder had happened, and when, and where, and in what context. So to wit, while this is a fun linguistist exercise, the story has no action and is all dialogue. Not every attempt at turning that sort of source material into a movie can turn out to be Glengarry Glenn Ross. To make the short visually appealing, they offer some nice shots of Toledo to where the story has been relocated; they also made Welt more physically attractive than he is in the book. On the whole, it serves.

For my German readers: The German translation's called Ein Fußmarsch von neun Meilen; if you search for that, google helpfully offers to substitute this with Ein Fußmarsch von neuen Medien.

Nachdem wir uns beim Vorbeigehen mehrmals wunderten, was denn das für ein komischer PC Laden bei uns um die Ecke ist der nicht mal Schaufenster hat, kam letztens die Erleuchtung.