Whistle [antikvár]

Introductory Note by Willie Morris James Jones died in the hospital in Southampton, Long Island, New York, on May 9, 1977, oL congestive heart failure. He was fifty-five. Whistle was to have had thirty-four chapters, Jones had completed somewhat more than half of Chapter 31 when he again became seriously ill. However, he had already plotted in considerable, and indeed almost finished detail his remaining material. I was his friend and neighbor, and in tape recordings and conversations with me over several months prior to his death, he left no doubt of his intentions for the concluding three chapters. As late as two days before he died, he was speaking into a tape recorder in the hospital. He planned for these last chapters to be relatively short. The ending of Whistle was firmly in his mind. All he lacked was time. Had he lived another month, I believe he would have written these chapters to his satisfaction. But he leaves what is essentially, by any judgment, a finished work. In his note about this book (see page 15), Jones has described his intentions on the scope of this work. This is the third novel in his war trilogy: From Here to Eternity (1951) being the first, then The Thin Red Line (1962), and now Whistle. He was obsessed by Whistle. He worked on it off and on for a very long time. He kept coming back to it, and it kept "turning on its spit in my head for nearly thirty years." After his first attack in 1970, he