A Name Can Set Someone in Place

If you have a name it can set someone in place. I have a great friend in California, the Irish novelist Brian Moore. We were having dinner one night and Brian said that when he was a newspaperman in Montreal a local character there was named Shake-Hands McCarthy. I said, Stop! Are you ever going to use that name? He said, No, let me tell you about him. I said, No, I don’t want to know anything about him. I just want to use that name. So the name turned up in True Confessions.

JOHN GREGORY DUNNE