He went back inside and got his other gun out of the hallway closet. It was a forty-four with grips and safety configured for a right-handed shooter. The cylinder also opened on the left side. Bosch couldn’t use it because he was left-handed.
I realize I’m 25 years late on this small but entertaining sample of “mystery-writer gun-writing”, but when my sister was out here for the holiday weekend, she mentioned that she really liked the series of novels she’d been reading recently on her constant international flights, about an LA detective named Bosch.
“Oh”, I said, “like in the series on Amazon Prime?”
“There’s a series?!”
We ended up bingeing the first two seasons. She downloaded the other two to her iPad before heading out of the country again.
Having noticed my interest, a few days ago Amazon flagged a low price on the Kindle edition of 5 of the early novels, plus the first in a related series. Annoyingly, the discount was on books 1, 5, 6, 7, and 8, but at least books 2-4 were under my $10 cutoff, and the average price came to $5.75 for all eight.
Skipping down the page a bit, we get to:
And he could have taken it to a gunsmith and had it reconfigured for left-handed use, …
When applied to a double-action revolver, this statement is roughly equivalent to “jack up the license plates and change the car”. Harry Bosch would need more than a homicide detective’s salary to find a pistolsmith who could transpaw a .44 revolver.
Left-handed revolvers do exist, today, but any left-handed cop back in the days before semi-autos took over the market got the standard model, and built up muscle memory on how to reload it quickly.
(and, no, this is not like the very-right-handed target grips you sometimes see; Harry got it from someone who hoped he’d use it to kill bad guys, and he puts it into his standard carry holster specifically so he has something to hand over before crossing the border into Mexico)
(update: …and the cop at the border smirks at him when he sees Bosch sign the form with his left hand after turning in a right-handed gun, sigh. Fortunately, none of these details are actually important to the story; it’s just a bit of flavor text to establish that a cop can easily work the system and manage to be armed in Mexico)
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