Politics & Power Quote by Leslie Charteris

There is a swagger hiding in the sentence’s sprawl: Charteris turns an autobiographical aside into a quiet credential, the writer as self-made field researcher. The year does heavy lifting. 1938 is late-Depression America, a country whose mythology of mobility is colliding with hardship, dust, and displacement. Choosing a trailer isn’t just quirky minimalism; it’s a way to bypass polite itineraries and live inside the infrastructure of the nation - roads, diners, campgrounds, border towns. He frames it as “the only way,” a deliberately absolute claim that flatters his method and gently mocks everyone else’s armchair America.

The prose mirrors the journey. It’s long, additive, almost breathless, like a highway that refuses to end. The repeated “and” functions as mileage, piling up destinations until the list becomes a map. Notice how the geography is less about famous cities than about edges and corridors: San Diego to the Canadian border; Miami to New Jersey. He’s tracing limits, testing the perimeter, implying a comprehensive scan without the pretense of statistical rigor. “Learned America” is the key verb, confidently proprietary. He’s not saying he visited; he’s claiming epistemic authority, as if America is a subject you can master through proximity and endurance.

As a novelist, the subtext is also pragmatic: this is research that doubles as brand-building. Charteris positions himself as the kind of writer who earns his setting descriptions, who can sell “authentic” America to readers back home - and perhaps to himself, as a cosmopolitan outsider insisting he’s seen the real thing.