Word: blam
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...right off when a novelist knows his way around the block. Take the first sentence of Larry McMurtry's moody, sensitive, ironic yet lightheartedly despairing new novel: "Duane was in the hot tub, shooting at his new doghouse with a .44 Magnum." The Jamesian restraint of the language -- not "Blam, blam, blam, wood chips glinted in the dusty air," but a dreamlike, almost passive kind of doghouse blasting -- foreshadows subtle stuff. The hero, we sense, is a country boy (the name Duane, and the implication that there is enough vacant acreage behind the doghouse so that stray bullets...
...three policemen step out front and level their pistols at the crowd. Blam, blam, blam, blam, blam. They empty their guns at the kids. Several people go down. But they are not lift; they're ducking. It takes about half a minute for the Weathermen to realize that those were blanks. But by then they are retreating. They have no guns...
...that follow. For Firefox is a magical airplane. It is blur-fast. It is invisible to radar. It has a shield that makes it almost impervious to enemy rockets. And a pilot can direct its weaponry with his brain waves; you think bad thoughts about the other guy, and blam! you blow him right out of the sky. It is probably true that possession of such a plane would control the cold war balance of power...
...blow their own heads off (by design or accident) or hit their own children by mistake. Most murders are done on impulse, and handguns are perfectly responsive to the purpose: a blind red rage flashes in the brain and fires a signal through the nerves to the trigger finger - BLAM! Guns do not require much work. You do not have to get your hands bloody, as you would with a knife, or make the strenuous and intimately dangerous effort required to kill with bare hands. The space between gun and victim somehow purifies the relationship - at least for the person...
...Elected on a platform decrying the evils of foreign capital, Manley was practically inviting foreign capital to leave. And his close relationship with the staunchly anticapitalist Cuba did not encourage foreign investors. Manley has so frightened Jamaican businessmen that they, too, have transferred their holdings abroad. For Manley to blam the outflow of capital which he instigated for his country's economic woes is simply a fraud...