Muscle cars, a box of priceless undiscovered records, a briefcase full of cash and the control room of a nuclear submarine. These are just some of the props in Richard Wall’s Five Pairs of Shorts, a collection of ten short stories guaranteed to turn any dreary commute into an edge of the seat experience.
Locations and characters are penned with a few vivid lines and the stories quickly build momentum from there, each one winding up to a sucker punch in the dark or a clanging frying pan to the head.
There is no clumsy attempts at deliberate misdirection here, instead the stories have an inbuilt feeling of impending disaster for at least one of the protagonists and its with an almost sick sense of anticipation that we can watch it unfold.
I read The Fat Elvis Diner a few months back and bought this off the back of it. I’m very glad I did!
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