1. Charles Willeford 2. Jim Thompson 3. Horace McCoy 4.
Patricia Highsmith
To my mind, these four writers all share a common thread.
Their fiction seems to include elements of surrealism and yet
somehow the authors manage to suspend disbelief. I've read a
few others along these lines. (For instance, Hallas' You Play
the Black and the Red Comes Up comes to mind. It features a
Hollywood producer with a poison collection and a political
party whose leader dresses in white togas.) Not surprisingly,
anything along these lines tends to resonate with me.
I don't mind the PI stuff, but when I read it I like it
pulpy. That means Hammett and Chandler -- with their literary
baggage -- take a back seat to this luminary:
5. Carter Brown
I read one of these and then tracked down most of Alan Yates'
(the man behind Carter Brown and several other pseudonyms)
other 200 books. During the early 1970s, I think he was
turning out a novel a week in several genres, including
gothic romance and hardboiled mystery. A writer's writer,
this whacky Australian did his darndest to bring to life
America's tarnished knights and decaying urban environs,
initially without ever having visited the U.S. Thank goodness
for the movies, I guess! The later books, written with 1970's
standards for sexual explicitness, get a bit to laughable as
the plots all begin to revolve around the sex scenes.
However, the earlier novels are all page-turners in the best
tradition of Carroll John Daly and the Mick.
If I hadn't been in such an honest mood, I'd have listed
Derek Raymond as number 5.
- Greg Swan
-- # To unsubscribe, say "unsubscribe rara-avis" to majordomo@icomm.ca. # The web pages for the list are at http://www.miskatonic.org/rara-avis/ .
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : 07 Jan 2000 EST