A summer with Kim Novak Read Online Free PDF Page A

London, Askersund and the Wild West, and it contained everything you could ask for from double-crossing and incorruptible honour to razor-sharp dialogue.
    ‘You have exactly one second to give me an answer, Mr. Frege, my time is valuable.’
    ‘That’s a mighty fine body you have there, Miss Carlson. Do you want to keep it?’
    ‘By the antlers of a moose, Nessie, you forgot to spike the tea with rum.’
    Colonel Darkin himself was a scarred sleuth who’d retreated to his log cabin in the mountains, and only poked his head out when the world needed him. His busty blonde niece was his sidekick, and she held sway over the opposite sex. I named her Vera Lane, and from her very first panel, I was in love.
    At the moment, she was locked away in an attic tower belonging to a mad scientist called Finckelberg. He had just roared off into town in his Ferrari to buy petrol so he could set her on fire. One hundred kilometres in the distance, Darkin was speeding toward the tower on his motorcycle, a BSA 300 LT with diamond spokes. I had to make sure he reached her before the flames began to lap at her lovely body; but I only had eight pages left in the notebook, and I was rubbish at drawing fire.
    I knew perfectly well that I wasn’t a particularly talented comic-book artist, but I felt a certain responsibility to the characters I’d created. If I didn’t write about them and keep drawing them, they would just sit there in the underwear drawer like forgotten marionettes.
    Sometimes it felt like a chore. But for the most part—especially when I was on a roll—it was one of the most meaningful things that I did during my entire childhood. Perhaps it felt that way because those were the only times that I managed to leave the troubles of the world behind.
    I’d never shown them to another living soul. And I’d never told anyone about Colonel Darkin.
    It was that kind of hobby.
    I opened an apple juice, took two large gulps. I thought for a while.
    ‘Goddammit!’ I wrote in Colonel Darkin’s speech bubble. ‘I should’ve known there’d be a catch.’

4
     
    Henry, my brother, wrote about everything in Kurren .
    About city-council meetings, speedway contests, and suspected arson. About two-headed calves and siblings meeting for the first time after fifty-seven years. What he didn’t glean from the news desk or from the local area, he found in other newspapers, both Swedish and international. He spent at least an hour a day in the Örebro library skimming the news and sensational headlines from all over the world, looking for leads for his own stories.
    He cut out everything he’d written that had made it to print and glued the clippings into large scrapbooks. At this point, during the summer that our mother was going to die, he already had half a dozen he sometimes let me leaf through when I visited his bedsit on Grevgatan. I liked curling up in his sagging bed, which had iron bars on the short ends of the frame, and perusing the headlines. I rarely read the articles, but the headlines spoke to me; at that time I didn’t know that it was usually someone other than Henry who came up with these beauties: ‘Sly Stowaway Sow Travels 200 Km’; ‘Schnapps: Good for Your Blood Pressure’; ‘German Ministers on French Leave in Arboga’.
    After I read a great headline, I would close my eyes and try to picture the complicated reality hidden behind it.
    Sometimes I could, sometimes not.
    ‘One thing,’ said Henry, my brother, one day when there was less than a week left of spring semester.
    I looked up from a cutting about a fireman from Flen who had fractured both femurs in Frövi.
    ‘Yeah?’ I said.
    Henry studied his cigarette and then put it out in the wet sand inside the monkey’s skull that he kept next to his Facit Privat typewriter.
    ‘About the summer.’
    He’s backing out, I thought. What a tosser.
    ‘What about it?’ I said.
    ‘A couple of things, really,’ he said and looked more like Ricky Nelson than