££££Prix : raisonnable • American • Manchester
THE APPEAL OF DAMON RUNYON, the New York storyteller, newspaperman and sportswriter came from his mastery, but also invention, of 1920s American slang – a mixture of the ‘louche and the lugubrious’ according to the New Yorker magazine. He would go to Lindy’s, an all-night Jewish deli on Broadway that became Mindy’s in his stories, and listen.Runyon married a down-on-her-luck Spanish countess from Madrid, 26 years his younger, who turned out to be an up-on-her-heels Mexican dancer from Tampico. When he died his ashes were taken up in a plane and sprinkled all over New York.
