Clothes in The Curious Eat Themselves

I have learned to pay attention to the clothes of characters through Clothes in Books, the fine blog of Moira Redmond. In reading The Curious Eat Themselves by John Straley I decided to keep track of how characters are dressed when they are introduced to the reader.

I will provide information on the character after each description. See if what they are is what you expected from what they wore.

George Doggy - “He was wearing a warm-up jacket from the Seattle Mariners open to the waist, except oddly, the top button. He had his trooper’s shield stuck in his shirt pocket and this kept his coat cocked out at an odd rake”

(Former Alaska State Trooper and now adviser to a series of state governors because of his unflinching honesty.)

Hannah - Two descriptions:

1.) “She was wearing a black tank top and had on skin-tight jeans with a bandanna around her knee. She had the skiff man’s baseball cap on backwards. The tank top draped down, almost exposing her nipples.”

2.) “Hannah was wearing her rubber boots folded down, and her canvas pants tucked loosely inside. She had on a plum silk shirt and wore a black beret with a silver Tlingit killer whale pin on its crown. Her pile coat lay folded on her lap”

(For Cecil she is “the woman who used to love me”. The first description involves her coked up days when drugs drove her life. The second is years later when she has gained sobriety and become a social worker.)

Lolly - “She was almost six feet tall, and we stood eye to eye. Her left eyetooth sported a gold cap. She wore a loose-fitting silk blouse and a purple jacket with padded shoulders over tight stretch pants. And as we stood in the doorway … the hem of her blouse fluttered onto the inside edge of my coat.”

(Proprietress of the Gotham - a cheap Ketchikan hotel.)

Louise - “.... was soft-spoken and had that young aristocratic look of a modern wilderness adventurer with expensive water-repellent clothes. They were black and gray with accents of vibrant lavender. She had on soft shoes and a Norwegian sweater. But her hands were large, deeply creased with callouses, and she had pale crescents of scars of the front edge of her left hand.”

(Louise Root is a college educated environmentalist who worked as a cook at an isolated mine and is the murder victim.)

Todd’s Dad - “He always wore a faded canvas jacket and a greasy ball cap covered with various enamel bird and fish pins. He’d hold his beer glass and cigarette in the same hand and cover his pile of change with his other hand, …”

(A logging mechanic who took “to drinking hard” after his wife died and was then permanently injured by a chain hoist.)

Dickie Stein - “... was wearing baggy shorts and green high-top sneakers. He had a haircut that made his head look vaguely like a toaster, and his T-shirt read U.S. OUT OF NORTH AMERICA.”

(A Harvard law graduate at 19 who is now practising law in Sitka.)

Lee Altman - “He was tired. I could tell from halfway down the street. He was wearing a camel’s hair coat, and a flannel shirt and he sagged into them as if he had been sleeping in his clothes for a week. On his feet were low-cut rubberized shoes that bulged out with some sort of synthetic insulation.”

(A middle aged fixer for the mining company, Global)

Charlie Potts - “He was looking up and down the street like a lost tourist while fussing with his silver lighter, banging it against his thigh and then sheltering it from the wind and against his cigarette …. appeared to be wearing a yellow cardigan sweater under his raincoat; his leather shoes had tassels on them.”

(The tough aide to the fixer.)

Steven Mathews - “Sitting there was a man smoking a pipe and wearing a flannel shirt, straddling the bench with a double-bited-axe sunk in the wood between his legs. He has on leather gloves and was holding a twelve-inch flat file.”

(Environmental guru.)

Sy Brown - “.... he was wearing a canvas duster-type raincoat, a broad-brimmed hat, and some odd-looking silver jewelry. He was nervously flattening his moustache against his upper lip …”

(One of the best defense attorneys in Alaska.)

Conspicuous by its absence is what the main character, private investigator Cecil Younger, was wearing when he opened the narration. As far as I could see there is no description in the opening chapters beyond Cecil putting on a “rubber rain suit” to go out searching in the Sitka rain. In the words of Moira, the lack of description of Cecil’s apparel, was a “tragically missed opportunity”. Maybe in the next book.

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Straley, John - (2019) - The Woman Who Married a Bear and Maureen's Reply; (2020) - The Curious Eat Themselves