The Last
Tram to
Velvet City

Nobody rides the 11:52 out of Halloran Yard for the scenery. Dex Marlowe took it because a woman in a rain-dark coat left a ticket on his desk blotter and forty dollars underneath it, and because the man who was supposed to ride it that night turned up in the river with his shoes still shined.

Velvet City is eleven blocks of tenement, one shuttered cannery, and a mayor who answers his own telephone at three in the morning. By the time Marlowe steps off onto the wet gravel he has been lied to four times, and only one of the lies was worth the trouble of telling.

“Calloway writes a street the way other people write a sentence — you can hear it drying out behind you.” The Kingsport Ledger, weekend edition