--- Michael Robison <
miker_zspider@yahoo.com> wrote:
> So what did you think of Edmund's Boys in the
Back
> Room? He's mostly an asshole towards the
hardboiled
> genre and some of his comments show a lack
of
> understanding, but every so often he hones in
with
> good perception. It's been a while since I read
it,
> but I think he was good on Steinbeck but poor
on
> Cain.
Wilson likes Cain more than I do. I love Cain's stories but
I'm underwhelmed by his writing and view. Where I do agree
with Wilson (in this narrow area) is his take on Horace
Mccoy. "They Shoot Horses . . ." is dreadfully written and
structured and understanding why the characters are doing
what they're doing relies more on what the reader brings than
what is actually there. I read the book within the last
couple of months and it was a chore to get through.
As for Hemingway, Steinbeck and O'Hara, I haven't been
through his essays on them. What I focused on was "Why Do
People Read Detective Stories" written in 1944 that people
such as Laura Lippman and others are still seething about.
Wilson -- and The New Yorker -- are symbols of those wretched
"literature" readers who don't get it (according to the
mystery readers) so I wanted to read it and see what all the
fuss is about. Wilson got so much hate mail that he wrote a
follow-up essay. My feeling is that the mystery novel is
heading off into the sunset with the western (and, yes, I've
read McCarthy and there's always a market for a new take on
any genre) and that the mystery novel is being diluted by
cross-genre (vampires, woo-woo and the like) and
self-publishing that is glutting the market with sloppy junk
(and, yes, some good books have been self-published but on
the whole it's splintering an already splinter market which
is why some conferences are limiting the participation of
those writers).
Anyway, that's the direction I'm off on although my recent
fulltime employment has seriously cut into my research time
and some things just never do end up where I thought they
would.
William
Essays and Ramblings
<http://www.williamahearn.com>
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