RARA-AVIS: Mario's readings
Joshua B Lukin (jblukin@acsu.buffalo.edu)
Mon, 23 Feb 1998 17:22:01 -0500 (EST)
Just a few comments on Mario's readings
My impression too is that D. Hitchens wrote a lot of
potboilers--"Sleep
w/Slander" and the novel to which it's a sequel ("Sleep
w/Strangers"?) are
reputed to be her best. But Boucher generally gave her great
reviews in
the Times, so I dunno.
Yes, Leigh Brackett could write. I discovered that first from
her
screenplays to _The_Big_Sleep_, _The_Long_Goodbye_, and
_Rio_Bravo_, then
from the stories featured in _American_Pulp_ and _Hard-Boiled_
(the
latter, "So Pale, So Cold, So Fair" infuriated me because I
wanted to
write a story about Youngstown gangsters and found that this
Californian
had scooped me by forty years! What business did she have
writing about my
hometown!), and from _No_Good_from_a_Corpse_ and
_An_Eye_for_An_Eye_. I
put Hitchens and Brackett into what I call the Howard Browne
category of
novelist--not innovators on the level of Chandler and Hammett,
but able
within an already-invented genre to write PERFECT stories.
_NGFC_ is
particularly notable in that it does that Chandler thang better
than
Chandler himself did in the books he was writing at the time
(what I mean
is, it has more invention than _High_Window_ and more suspense
than
_Lady_in_the_Lake_).
Queen of hard-boiled? I'd have to nominate Dorothy Belle
Hughes and
Helen Nielsen.
Just some thoughts,
Josh
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