What I'm Reading: The Red Chesterfield by Wayne Arthurson (2019)

[delphi]

✓ kingstoken's 2026 Book Bingo: First Person POV

The Red Chesterfield by Wayne Arthurson is a 2019 crime novella (with a touch of magical realism) about a bylaw enforcement officer, M, who finds a body while investigating an abandoned chesterfield. The incident leaves M shaken and drawn into more than one mystery as the chesterfield keeps appearing and a regular on M's route disappears. But the book is less interested in answering "whodunnit" than it is with looking at characters' decisions about getting involved in crime and drama and how priorities around family, romantic relationships, career, community, truth and justice can shift the usual narrative shape of the genre.

This is one of those books that I want to take apart with a little eyeglass screwdriver to see how it works. It's an absolute marvel of efficiency. It's only 99 pages (that exact number being by design, I suspect) with large text and several half-page chapters, but it's packed with story. It covers a lot of ground without feeling like it's moving as fast as it is. We get to know so much about who M is as a person but from a deep enough position that we skip a lot of high-level markers or exposition. This story is built on implication and inference, and the reader's principally assigned to solving the protagonist rather than the plot.

I really enjoyed this one, and I'm looking forward to checking out the author's other work.

The Yard Sale (Possibly Illegal)

On a yellow tarp stretched between two upright hockey sticks the words are printed in black magic marker: YARD SALE. But this is not a typical yard sale. The coughing/spitting man's front yard is filled with what can only be termed junk—the details did not register at first because junk is just junk. It has no resemblance to the leftover bits that average people collect in their lives, forget about, outgrow, and then sell in their yard sales. This is something else.

"How long have you held this yard sale?"

"Two days," he quickly says.

"My report says this was running last week. Not really a definition of a yard sale."

"The bylaw says yard sales can't run three consecutive days and I haven't done that. This week was only two days, last week the same."

"You keep the sign up all the time."

"So what. I don't sell stuff then. Only on weekends. So it's a yard sale."

I look over the yard again at tables covered with household appliances and tools, books, faded toys, cutlery, plates, cups, saucers, shoes, boots, boxes filled with children's clothes, nut, bolts, nails, screws, drill bits, washers, hammers, wrenches, and screwdrivers. Hundreds of hockey and lacrosse sticks, baseballs, bats, tennis, badminton, squash, and racquetball racquets, shovels, rakes, and lawn mowers. One industrial-sized upright freezer, missing a door. And so much more.

After a moment he asks: "You going to give me a ticket?"

After a moment I shake my head. "No. Not today. Just a warning."

He smiles, spitting once more on the ground in front of me.


This Fucking City

As I open the door to my truck, I hear a voice. "You gonna do something about the yard sale?"

I turn to see a middle-aged man approaching me from a house across the street. He wears a bathrobe over his pyjamas, his feet tucked into a pair of slippers.

"I'm investigating the complaint," I tell him.

"Yeah but are you going to do something about it?"

It's city policy not to reveal such information, but like the yard sale blaw, it's a fluid policy. "I will first issue a warning."

"A warning? That's it. A fucking warning? It's been like that for weeks. It's ruining the neighbourhood."

"That's the protocol, sir."

The man stares at me for several seconds and then shakes his head. "Jesus fuck," he says. "This fucking city."


The Red Chesterfield Redux

Unable to shake my thoughts about the Red Chesterfield, I head out of the cul de sac and approach the ditch from the other side. I park by the side of the road and climb out of my vehicle.

From this point of view, I can now see that it's a bit more damaged on the back than the front, with a couple of good-sized rips in the fabric. For some reason this bothers me, that someone would treat a chesterfield in such a manner.

Something sticks out from one of the holes, a shoe it looks like. I step into the ditch to get a better look.

It's a shoe. A Nike sneaker. white but with many scuffs. Maybe it's because I'm looking for some reason behind the discarding of such a decent piece of furniture, or maybe I don't like how the scuffed sneaker takes away from overall gestalt of this Red Chesterfield—I do have a tendency for order, which is one reason I make a good bylaw officer—but I grab the sneaker.

To my surprise, there's more heft to the sneaker than expected. I pull it out and, to my further surprise, there's a foot cut off at the ankle still in the shoe.

I drop the shoe.

Comments

[greghousesgf]

I'm interested.