Archangel (1983)

Keith Korman's novel, published by Viking in 1983, is set in Blue Vista Flats, a small Midwestern community in the grip of the Great Depression in 1933, where young Buck Walker witnesses the brutal murder of a vagrant and a broken-down Model A Ford brings the other-worldly Mrs. Moon, her sensual daughter and her son into town. The jacket calls it a melodrama through which Buck learns a little about love and a lot about life. (Open Library)

Watches

Elgin watch: In Bart Lowell's Rooms-To-Let, the fastidious lodger Parker Watts performs his waking ritual across the hall from Eve, who runs the town's telephone switchboard: he combs his damp hair, puts on a starched shirt and the only pair of wing tips in Blue Vista Flats, buffed with a Fuller brush, and, last of all, loops an Elgin wristwatch around his wrist, another present from his mother. The maker is named; the model is not.

Source text: He found his shoes, polished the night before, and put them on. He used a stiff Fuller shoe brush to buff up the shine. The shoes were wing tips, probably the only pair in Blue Vista Flats. Last of all he looped an Elgin wristwatch around his wrist. Another present from his mother. (Keith Korman, Archangel, scan cataloged as Viking Press, 1983, p. 24; he is named Parker Watts on the same page; Internet Archive scan OCR)