Re: RARA-AVIS: Re: RARA-AVIS Digest V3 #227

From: Bob Toomey ( btoomey@javanet.com)
Date: 09 May 2000


RRandisi@aol.com wrote:
> Anybody here ever read Mike Roscoe or John B. West? I read them years ago as
> a young man and I recall liking them. I was a sucker for the stuff back
> then, moreso than now, and ever like the Neil McNeil books

I've only read one Mike Roscoe (great name for a hardboiled writer), RIDDLE ME THIS, and it was damn good. Rosco was actually a couple of Kansas City private eyes named John Roscoe and Mike Russo. There's a photo of them on the back cover of my Signet edition, two hard looking lads in hats. West was a weird case, a black Liberian doctor, expert in tropical diseases, and entrepreneur, who wrote bloody pseudo Spillane thrillers about a white private eye in a never never land he called America. Facinating stuff, but not especially well written. Neil McNeil (W.T. Ballard on a sunny day) wrote some very funny novels, five I thinmk, about a couple of cheerful bruisers named Costaine & McCall. All worth picking up, although a couple of chapters of West is probably enough for most folks.

BobT

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