Last year, I bought a big pile of paperbacks that included a
lot of Kane
and a lot of Kane. I agree with Bill Crider that Frank Kane
was not a
powerhouse, although he was competent (he also repeated
himself from
book to book, as noticed here in a previous discussion).
However, "hack"
may be too strong a word to describe such a readable
author.
On the other hand, I am a minor fan of Henry Kane, a very
skilled
commercial writer who in the sixties went from spicy to
soft-porn to no
visible detriment of his stories. His characters and
situations are
interesting quite apart from the crime element. Even if he
used sex
purely as a hook, as I think he did, he really knew how to
write about
it, something that cannot be said of many hardboiled
writers.
I am now working on Donald Hamilton's #2 Matt Helm novel,
_The Wrecking
Crew_. I could not find #1, our assigned reading, even though
I'm sure I
have two copies of it! Twenty-five pages into it, TWC seems a
fine and
tense thriller. I'll send some comments when I've
finished.
Regards,
mt
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