...In a Troubled Drum

The mythology of the man swirls thick and fast around R.A. Grimes, an author whose lasting influence on the literary zeitgeist remains impermeably splashed like spilled dregs of Carlo Rossi. Apocryphal legends abound regarding Grimes the drinker, Grimes the womanizer, Grimes the belligerent, Grimes the unexpectedly tender-hearted. It’s undeniably more glamorous to imagine our heroes drowning in whiskey and women than parked for eight hours a day in front of the typewriter, but it is precisely that unglamorous discipline from which books are born, and precisely that unglamorous discipline, plus the attendant drinking, womanizing, belligerence, and tenderness, that gave rise to The collected early works of R.A. Grimes. Compiled from the monthly magazine.