I'm with Mark. For booze-soaked screwball tales, Jonathan
Latimer's Bill Crane novels are hard to top, if you can find
them. Of course, they were written back when being drunk was
considered funny. Still, the books provide a nice antidote to
EIGHT MILLION WAYS TO DIE and vice versa.
(And speaking of EIGHT MILLION WAYS TO DIE, isn't that about
the worst, most disappointing adaptation of a great
hard-boiled novel ever committed to film? I saw it years ago
and thought it reeked. I re-watched it just this weekend, and
I've decided I was too generous originally. The video should
bear the warning: "Watch only in a well-ventilated
area.")
>By anybody's definition of both noir and hardboiled,
this book (Greg
>Rucka's SHOOTING AT MIDNIGHT) is both, in spades. As
soon as you
>finish whatever you happen to be reading, each and
every one of you
>on the list should pick up this book and try and put
it down.
And I'm with John, too. I really dug SHOOTING AT MIDNIGHT,
prologue and all. A lot of people felt the book was too
over-the-top, too comic- booky, but I thought the opening
salvo, with the fast-forward account of Logan's life, sets it
all up so well that I couldn't help but enjoy the ride. I
found it not so much comic-booky, as just good old
pulpy.
Not that Rucka couldn't make it comic-booky if he really
wanted to. He's written several graphic novels, and he's
currently writing the Batman continuity in Detective Comics.
In fact, he's introduced a female bodyguard character
(assigned to Bruce Wayne, against his wishes) who'd be right
at home in his novels.
>Logan's struggle is such that she actually disappears
in the middle section of
>the book and Kodiak takes over the narrative as he
tries to find her.
It's interesting to note that Amazon.com's Number One
reviewer refers to Kodiak as making a "brief appearance" in
this book. Which sorta puts into perspective the worthiness
of some of those reviews.
-- Kevin -- # 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/ .
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