I and Claudie (Double Mountain Books) Review

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(More customer reviews)"Treasure depends." This lapidary phrase (a treasure in itself) comes from one of the short stories in I and Claudie written by the unknown (to me) Dillon Anderson, who ought to become instantly famous for this little jewel alone.
The small joys of a 1940's short story collection are a tough sale, but this one is worth the bandwidth. See, there's these two guys, Clint Hightower and Claudie Hughes (the titular I and Claudie) who flee legal entanglements in late 1940's New Orleans and go to Texas, where they get into the mildest, sweetest, tenderest scrapes ever, all narrated with crooked innocence by Clint himself.
My favorite two stories are "The Auction" and "Fixing Windmills" (these titles hint at the gentleness of their adventures). In the first one, Clint utterly fails to be an auctioneer, and in the second one, no windmills are fixed at all. The introduction to the 1999 edition points out that the key to writing about rascals is to have them never win, which is true of Clint and Claudie. However, in this book, the right side still always wins, and, now, in the year of Oh!Lord! 2006 there's something charmingly prelapsarian about having the good guys triumph.
I convey my highest recommendations.


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I and Claudie is a delightful and captivating novel about a couple of bungling but good-hearted con men who (barely) make their way across Texas over a two-year period in the 1930s. Their adventures, Anderson said, were "in no sense autobiographical, but sometimes I am sorry they are not." The charming con men outwit lumbermen, oil men, and others, but are sometimes the victims themselves. Clint Hightower (the "I" in the title) is a smooth- talking maker of deals; Claudie Hughes, all 6'6" of him, is his slower-of-mind sidekick who does all the real work and, often unwittingly, saves the day.The reader is both entertained and informed by the book. We learn much about Texas and Texans of the period. We learn about hurricanes along the coast, oil leasing and lumbering in East Texas, buried treasure in West Texas, the state fair in Dallas, the stockyards in Forth Worth, farming along the Brazos River, and more.The stories that make up the novel have been compared in style to O. Henry's classic tales. Several of them appeared in the venerable Atlantic Monthly before the book was published in 1951.One of A.C. Green's all time top 50I and Claudie is a delightful book. One or two latter-day critics have termed it too ingenuous for our sophisticated age. Don't believe them. Clint Hightower would be right at home today in many an executive suite, with Claudie . . . waiting to take the fall for him.- A. C. Greene, The Fifty Best Books on Texas

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