Re: RARA-AVIS: Hardboiled politics

From: Joy Matkowski ( jmatkowski1@comcast.net)
Date: 22 Jul 2003


Right now I'm reading a new author ARC, Peter Spiegelman's Black Maps, which fits the loser PI model very well, to the extent that his siblings call him a loser to his face. Great book if the ending holds up.
    The last PI I read was Lovers Crossing by another new author, James C. Mitchell. At the book's start, he isn't that much of a loser except that he's a PI because he was shot up as a border patrol agent, but his personal life unravels over the course of the book. Also a book worth reading.
    The only PI I read in June was Ken Bruen's The Guards, in which the PI is an alcoholic in the process of being evicted.

Joy

Michael R Robison challenged:
> They don't lose at their jobs, but the rest of their life
> sucks. They have few friends. They don't like hardly anybody.
> They are not happy. If they have a relationship at all with
> someone of the opposite sex, it's usually dysfunctional. Let
> me name the authors of the last 10 private/police detective
> novels I've read: Taibo, Hammett, Prather, Hamilton, Sallis,
> Estelman, Torrey, Lochte, McGivern, Corris. Two of them are
> old enough that they had no private life, Torrey and Hammett.
> That leaves 8. Out of those 8, only Prather's Shell Scott was
> a happy camper, and he is so ridiculous as to not hardly count.
>
> Name the last few detective novels you've read. No cheating
> and culling the list to fit the premise, either. I wanna hear
> about some of these hardboiled winners.

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