Rob Price
Gutbrain Records
rob + gutbrain.com = email

2011 April 13 • Wednesday

Dexter is somewhat famous for loving the subway. He knows many of the routes by heart and can tell you not only the names of every stop on the 7 or Q lines, for instance, but also what transfers are available at each stop.

He's a bit over three years old now but even when he was two he was informing startled passengers on the F that they could transfer at Broadway-Lafayette station to the B, D, M and downtown 6 trains.

Alice and I take long subway rides with him a few times a week, usually going out to Coney Island and then taking a train from there to some other destination. Flushing and Astoria are popular goals because the trips are long and involve a lot of time on elevated tracks. There's also something good to eat when we get there: Chinese food in Flushing, Thai in Woodside, Greek in Astoria.

Inspired by Dexter's focus on the New York subway system, I decided to read Thomas Walsh's To Hide a Rogue, a 1964 thriller about a New York City Transit police officer.

A violent and vicious criminal has a plan to avenge himself on the woman he holds responsible for his crippling muscle disease (another physically handicapped villain) and the death of his brother.

Part of his plan involves killing a subway train driver and threatening to kill more unless the transit workers' union pays him $20,000 in cash.

The climax of the book takes place on the subway and in the subway train yards. I read some of the book while riding the subway with Dexter and maybe Dexter will like to read it when he's older.

The subway stations and lines weren't familiar to me—Triboro line, Linden Avenue, etc.—and I couldn't match them to a map at the Transit Museum that was from around the same time. This interfered a bit with my enjoyment.

It seems that much of the action takes place on what we'd call the 7 line now. Most of the trains seem to be running on elevated tracks in Queens and there's a Junction Place station that could be what we know as Junction Boulevard.

It's a decent page-turner with a good villain though the handling of sex is dated and puritanical, particularly in regards to homosexuality (typical of the time, I guess).

The title isn't so great, either. It's a line from a Ralph Waldo Emerson essay and doesn't have anything to do with the story, as far as I could tell.