Another thing that strikes me when reading Retreat is how the
settings of his novels kept get smaller and smaller. The
action in Retreat from Oblivion takes place in New York and
Spain, Dark Passage from San Quentin to San Francisco, by the
time he wrote Cassidy's Girl, the novels were confined to the
city of Philadelphia. Then came novels where action was
contained within a neigborhood. Then came novels like Black
Friday where the action was contained in a single house or
Street of No Return or Street of the lost where the action
takes place pretty much on a single block. As you go through
his novels they get more and more claustrophobic and
increasingly bleak. Even in The Wounded and the Slain, which
takes place in Jamaica, the action takes place pretty much in
a hotel and the neighborhood immediately surrounding
it.
Jeff
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