Novel
Four Days
John Buell · 1962
Synopsis
Montreal, one week in June. A twelve-year-old orphan boy admires his older brother Milt, who first employs him to spot, on his newspaper round in Westmount, the houses left empty during the holidays. Milt then moves on to the big job, the hold-up of a large bank in the city: the child, waiting close by, is to receive the money on the quiet and disappear. A meeting is arranged in the Laurentians, where he is supposed to be going to summer camp.
Context
The book appeared in 1962 from Farrar, Straus and Cudahy in New York and from Macmillan in London, three years after its author's first novel, and appeared in French the following year. Out of the catalogues by the early nineties, it was reissued in 2018 by a Montreal house that is unearthing Canadian noir fiction. A Canadian film was made from it in 1999, from a screenplay far removed from it.
Who it is for
A short, tense novel in which everything is seen through the child; the only French translation dates from 1963.
Prizes and reception
Edmund Wilson, who was then surveying Canadian letters, counted its author, on the strength of this book, among the foremost writers of Canada.
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