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LotR by RAYMOND CHANDLER
An excerpt from a tale of that world-weary, hard-boiled private investigator, Philip Frodo.
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Book I - Chapter 13
I drove south from Overhill but I didn’t go home. At the East Road I turned east and swung out past Frogmorton, Whitfurrows, and Stock. There was nothing lonely about the trip. There never is on that road. Fast lads in stripped down buggies shot in and out of traffic streams, missing the bigger wagons by a sixteenth of an inch, but somehow always missing them. Tired Hobbits in dusty carts and carriages winced and tightened their grip on the reins and ploughed south and east towards home and dinner, an evening with the family genealogical charts, the barking of their flea-ridden dogs, the whining of their spoiled children and the gabble of their silly wives.
Behind the Bucklebury Ferry an occasional light winked from the hills. The holes of the high-class Hobbits. High-class Hobbits, phooey. The veterans of a thousand scandals. Hold it, Frodo, you’re not a Hobbit tonight.
The air got cooler. The highway narrowed. I ate dinner at a place near Rushy. Bad but quick. Feed ‘em and throw ‘em out. Lots of business. We can’t bother with you sitting over your second cup of coffee, mister. You’re using money space. See those Hobbits over there behind the rope? They want to eat. Anyway, they think they have to. Eru knows why they want to eat here. They could do better at home out of the back of the larder. They’re just restless. Like you. They have to get the wagon out and go somewhere. Sucker-bait for the racketeers that have taken over the inns. Here we go again. You’re not a Hobbit tonight, Frodo.
All right. Why would I be? I’m sitting in that Hobbit-hole, playing with a dead fly and in pops this dowdy little item from Bree and chisels me down to a shop-worn silver penny to find her brother. He sounds like a creep but she wants to find him. So with this fortune clasped to my chest, I trundle down to Bywater and the routine I go through is so tired I’m half asleep on my feet. I meet nice people, with and without daggers in their necks. I leave, and I leave myself wide-open too. Then she comes in and takes the silver penny away from me and gives me a kiss and gives it back to me because I didn’t do a full day’s work.
So I go see Aragorn son of Arathorn, retired (and how) Ranger from Lothlórien, and meet again the new style in neckwear. And I don’t tell the Shirriffs. I just frisk the customer’s toupee and put on an act. Why? Who am I cutting my throat for this time? A blonde with sexy foot-hair and too many door keys? A lass from Bree? I don’t know. All I know is that something isn’t what it seems and the old tired but always reliable hunch tells me that if the hand is played the way it is dealt the wrong person is going to lose the pot. Is that my business? Well, what is my business? Do I know? Did I ever know? Let’s not go into that. You’re not a Hobbit tonight, Frodo. Maybe I never was or ever will be. Maybe I’m an orc-spawn with a private license. Maybe we all get like this in the cold half-lit world where always the wrong thing happens and never the right.
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