I read Evan Hunter’s short story The Last Spin that was published in 1960. Hunter’s indigenous name is Salvatore Lombino, but he is also known by many other stage names, for example Ed McBain, Richard Marsten, Hunt Collins, Curt Cannon and Ezra Hannon. He has written a manuscript to Alfred Hitchcock’s movie The Birds and hundreds of other books.
The Last Spin is a short story and it tells about two boys who belong to the opposite clubs and they are forced to settle an argument over territory. The way to settle that is not very beautiful. The boys are playing Russian Roulette, so they can avoid big street boppins. At first they are real enemies. But the closer they come to the end the closer the get to each other. Boys notice that they have quite a lot of things in common. Alternately they put the gun to their temple and squeezed the trigger. After every squeezing the mode became more relaxed and deeper. But as always, in the end things didn’t go like boys planned.
The main characters, and the only characters, in the story are these two boys from different gangs. Tigo, the boy from the club of green jackets, is always the boy who starts conversation and also the game. He seems to be more experienced in this kind of things. Danny instead belongs to the club of blue jackets. He is more reserved and also afraid of what will happen. But of course he can’t show Tigo his suspicion. The story is placed in the beginning 1960’s in America where different gangs were very mutual phenomenon.
Language in this short story isn’t very difficult but there are some strange and new words. But the same words could be found all over the text so after you have checked them once from the dictionary, the end of the text is quite easy to read. The story is anyway good and interesting, but you need to read it twice to understand it, because at first you have no idea what is the text about.