Okay, so my Hitchcock reread fell by the wayside a bit over the autumn. According to this thread, I haven't read any of the stories since October. Ooops. Time to put that right... I'm determined to finish rereading the book by the end of the year! Getting back into it, and the next story is 'Social Climber' by Robert J. Higgins. And... this one wasn't familiar at all. Nothing came back to me as I was reading it!
I wonder if this one isn't familiar because it's not one of the more memorable stories in the collection? So it might not have stuck in my mind as much as some of the others? Saying that, it's been weird finding out which stories I've remembered and which ones I haven't, so it's not like there's a set of hard and fast rules here.
Anyway, Higgins's story is an okay (if a little bland) tale of a wannabe cat burglar who goes to see the notorious 'King of the Cat Burglars' to persuade him to pull a job. It's quite obvious there's going to be a twist in the tale, and it's pretty easy to guess what that's going to be (though you may not guess the significance of the shoe polish). It's a pretty short and sweet tale, and it's not a bad read by any means. But clearly it didn't make a big impact on teenage me, and I don't think it's made much more of an impact on adult me either!
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