Before discovering the hardboiled genre in my late teens I
was a voracious reader of general fiction. The highlights of
those years were Robert Louis Stevenson, Chesterton, J. B.
Priestley, and P.G. Wodehouse -- and E.B. WHite's classic
collection, _One Man's Meat_. All of these are still
favorites. They showed me that you could write brilliant
stuff about any topic whatsoever, that the stuff was in the
writing, not on the topic, and that there were definitely
different levels of achievement in literature (and I hadn't
yet met Cervantes, Faulkner, Borges, Calvino, and so
on!).
The first hardboiled book I ever read was Chandler's now
out-of-print collection of "cannibalized stories",
_Killer in the Rain_. This completely bowled me over, and it
also spoiled _Farewell My Lovely_ for me since the original
stories are better, or at least I thought so then. Around the
same time, I got a copy of Howard Browne's _The Taste of
Ashes_, another great discovery and lifelong favorite. I
quickly went and got all the Chandlers and stumbled upon
Hammett in some blurb or other. That was the next discovery.
I haven't stopped since...
Recent discoveries: Pelecanos, Kent Harrington, Billie Sue
Mosiman, Kent Anderson.
Some guys I discovered waaaay too late: William Campbell
Gault, Richard Prather, Peter Rabe, David Goodis and Cornell
Woolrich.
Regards to all, gray and otherwise. When accused of being an
old man, Cervantes said that he didn't write with his great
hairs but with his wisdom, which got better, not worse, with
age.
mt
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