Miker wrote:
> Chris M wrote:
>
> One side note: could you or someone else make a
case
> for what I'm missing with Rankin? I love
Pelecanos,
> Lehane, Sallis, Bruen, McDermid, Connelly etc. and
it
> seems like Rankin is alsways included with that
lot.
>
> ***********
> On-stage violence? Rankin avoids it. The
word
> "unflinching" is used fairly often in
describing
> hardboiled. Rankin is a flincher.
I can think of literally thousands of scenes of violence in
both print and film that I have witnessed in one form or
another and after a while, they all begin to run together.
Yet the shower scene in "Psycho" with not a blow showing as
having landed, stands out in my memory, likewise the sequence
of events surrounding the out-of-view deaths of Miles Archer
("The Maltese Falcon") and Taylor Henry ("The Glass Key"), so
I'm not at all certain that it is "flinching" to forego what
can many times be the "gratuitous" portrayal of violence.
Rankin's style is the antithesis of, say, a Mickey Spillane.
To dismiss Rankin as a "flincher" is to give more credit to
Spillane and his ilk than he is due. After all, good writing
is about maximizing the impact of one's narrative, regardless
of the circumstances surrounding said narrative. And Hammett
not only wasn't a "flincher," he was certainly no piker when
it came to portraying violence in service of the story (see
"Harvest, Red").
What's more, Lehane, Pelecanos and Connelly at least have
shown that none of them handles a series, foregoing plotting
cliches, etc., as well as Rankin does. Not to say they're not
good writers (although I don't find Pelecanos to really be my
cup of tea), just that stuff like "The Poet," "Mystic River"
and "The Narrows," for example, is a lot more powerful and
original than the Kenzie/Gennaro series (to use Lehane as
merely one example), or the later Bosch novels (to use
Connelly as another). After all, it's tough to keep a series
fresh. Not a knock on them, just pointing out that it's tough
to write a series without it getting stale. We've discussed
that ad infinitum on this list with regard to the writing of
other series PI stuff (see Parker, Robert B.). I see no
reason to spare the current "Young (sic) Masters" (to borrow
from another recent thread here) that same manner of
scrutiny.
Oh, and Ken Bruen rocks.
My two cents.
Brian Thornton
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