Mike,
It's extremely flattering to be compared in any way to
Goodis, Ellroy and especially Jim Thompson. About Fast Lane
in its use of dark humor being an improvement on Thompson,
no. There's no way to improve on Hell of a Woman, Savage
Night, Swell-Looking Babe, The Getaway, etc.
Like Thompson, Hammett was also very good in his use of dark
gallows humor. I don't think there's a better punchline
anywhere in crime fiction than the ending of "Gutting of
Couffignal". Another writer of that era who was really
brilliant at it was Jonathan Latimer. His Bill Crane books
mixed a kind of screwball comedy sensibilities with the
hardboiled genre. His Solomon Vineyards, which was his Red
Harvest (with a touch of Maltese Falcon), excelled in
it--from the outrageous forward, to the the alias his PI took
(Karl Craven), to one of my favorite scenes in hardboiled PI
literature where Craven ends up pulling a mobster's head
through jail bars and using it as a punching bag, the book is
dripping in gallows humor.
--Dave Zeltserman
--- In
rara-avis-l@yahoogroups.com, Michael Robison
<miker_zspider@...> wrote:
>
> Reading this week has been a tag team affair
between
> Zeltserman's Fast Lane and Vollman's
Butterfly
> Stories. By shear force of the story alone, it was
an
> unfair match. Fast Lane won.
>
> Like Goodis, Zeltserman can bring a minor character
to
> life in a few precise sentences. Like James
Ellroy,
> he can smoothly crank up the tension as the
story
> progresses. You can feel them sweat. Probably
the
> most striking parallel is with the works of
Jim
> Thompson. Like Thompson, Zeltserman excels
at
> invoking an almost hypnotic fascination with
a
> character's hand basket ride into his own
private
> hell.
>
> One thing worth mentioning is the juxtaposition
of
> humor and horror. Without some sort of relief, a
noir
> work risks losing the reader by drowning in its
own
> morbid ooze. Woolrich's I Married a Dead Man is
a
> good example. Dark humor is the writer's
preferred
> choice of relief. Willeford understood this.
Same
> with Al Guthrie and Vicki Hendricks. But
the
> technique is not risk-free. Humor can negate
the
> desperation of the noir condition and turn
reader
> empathy to apathy. What it takes is a
graveyard,
> irony-dripping humor that complements the text
rather
> than contradicting it. In this arena, Zeltserman is
a
> master. He has not only read Jim Thompson. He
has
> improved on him. Thompson's Pop. 1280 is
almost
> always in danger of devolving into a farcical
joke.
> Fast Lane avoids this with a wicked humor
integrated
> perfectly into the increasingly dark world of
Johnny
> Lane.
>
> miker
>
>
>
>
______________________________________________________________________
______________
> Moody friends. Drama queens. Your life? Nope! -
their life, your
story. Play Sims Stories at Yahoo! Games.
> http://sims.yahoo.com/
>
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