RARA-AVIS: Ellroy, T.J. Parker

From: Mario Taboada ( matrxtech@yahoo.com)
Date: 22 May 2000


Bob Randisi:

<<I was never able to get into T. Jeff Parker's work until I read WHERE SERPENT'S LIE and THE BLUE HOUR. I gave him a second chance.>>

Have your red The Triggerman's Dance? To my mind, it's a masterpiece, one of the best things I've read in recent years. This writer could never be accused of technical inadequacy: he's rock-solid.

Now to Ellroy: What you see as technical weakness, I see as originality of voice. After all, many great writers have been accused of a defective technique, from Cervantes to Faulkner to Grass. Cervantes's work, for example, is full of interpolations, errors of fact (names change, for example) and digressions, and his sentences are not "elegant" in a literary sense. However, when you read them *aloud*, they come alive and are as fresh and real today as when he wrote them. Likewise, Faulkner comes alive when you speak his novels and stories. His work bites. The same goes for Ellroy, and therein lies the force of his work. I am not saying that he is a literary genius, or even as good as, say, Gores, Constantine, Higgins, or Leonard at their best, but there is a lot more in his work than "shock value". Have you read his The Big Nowhere? If not, I recommend it (I think it's his masterpiece).

Regards,

mt

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