Longholme

Longholme is a Massachusetts town whose rural outskirts bring together the deliberate geography of a planned visit and the abrupt violence that follows. The address of Edward George Ricks on Berkshire Way draws the narrator off the main route and into a landscape that seems quiet and removed from the region’s cities; at the house, that quiet is shattered when the narrator shoots Mrs. Ricks and then fires at Ricks in the doorway.

Setting and Approach

The narrator’s road atlas places Longholme about twenty miles west of Springfield and north of the Massachusetts Turnpike. To reach it, he drives north into Massachusetts, turns at Great Barrington, and then continues to Longholme. Rather than pass through the town, he takes country roads around it, eventually turning onto Berkshire Way close to noon. On the map the road is a winding line extending north from the town, a route that suggests the hills and rural terrain ahead.

The area feels distinct from the more wooded countryside the narrator has crossed in Connecticut. Farms, cleared fields, and wide valleys open up the view; the large but unpretentious houses suggest residents who have little to prove to their neighbors. Longholme is not suburban in the narrator’s impression, lying too far from New York, Boston, and Albany to feel like an extension of any of them. This remoteness gives the journey a sense of concealment: the narrator takes the longer country route because avoiding the town seems worth the extra time and trouble.

Berkshire Way and the Ricks Residence

The destination is 7911 Berkshire Way, the address listed for Edward George Ricks. The house stands on the right side of the road as the narrator approaches. It is modern but built on a traditional plan, and the narrator guesses it was probably constructed after the Second World War. The residence is thus introduced through practical details—the address, the road, and the building’s appearance—before the place becomes the scene of an attack.

The narrator has come in the hope of finding Ricks at home, having followed a route shaped by his knowledge of the address and his previous experience with another intended victim. Longholme is not merely a name on the atlas: the approach to Berkshire Way and the house fixes the action in a specific domestic landscape, among farms, open valleys, and private homes.

The Attack and Narrative Significance

At the house, Mrs. Ricks sees the narrator and runs toward the front door, screaming for Ed. He catches up with her across the lawn and shoots her from behind with a Luger pistol. Exhausted from the chase, he sinks to one knee beside her. When the front door opens and Edward George Ricks appears, the narrator fires again, but the bullet strikes the aluminum beside the doorframe. Ricks retreats into the house and locks the door, leaving the narrator outside.

The contrast between Longholme’s open, unhurried setting and the violence at the residence sharpens the scene’s effect. The rural road that had offered a discreet approach leads not to the controlled encounter the narrator hoped to repeat, but to an exposed confrontation in which a witness escapes into the house. Longholme’s significance in the novel rests on this reversal: its quiet distance from urban centers becomes the backdrop for violence that cannot be contained within the narrator’s plan.