Bill Hagen:
> The So-Blue Marble is still very much in the
Buchan
> (39 Steps) tradition, though the assassin twins
(as
> I remember) have the polish of Eric Ambler at his
best.
> Believe Hughes dedicated one or more of her
early
> fictions to Ambler.
I just finished THE BAMBOO BLONDE which strongly reminded me
of Ambler.
Except I much prefer Ambler. This was one very boring book.
Hardly anything happened, and what few plot-driving events
there were, were mostly only referred to by the characters
after they had happened. Plenty of characters and plenty of
personal motifs consequently turned this into a narrative
mess. The characters could hardly be described as hardboiled,
either.
The one interesting bit was the historical context it was
written in. It's copyrighted in 1941 but obviously written
before Pearl Harbour.
I won't dismiss Hughes, though. I also read two of her short
stories this weekend; HOMECOMING (re- printed in PURE PULP)
and THE BLACK AND WHITE BLUES
(in AMERICAN PULP) and they were both excellent, esp. the
latter. I also recently began reading DREAD JOURNEY and
judging by the first few pages it's way better than
BAMBOO.
Anders Engwall
-- # To unsubscribe from the regular list, say "unsubscribe rara-avis" to # majordomo@icomm.ca. This will not work for the digest version. # The web pages for the list are at http://www.miskatonic.org/rara-avis/ .
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : 07 May 2001 EDT