RARA-AVIS: fictional beatings, James W. Hall
BaxDeal@aol.com
Fri, 7 Aug 1998 13:27:56 EDT
James wrote:
>Anyone who has ever gotten a really bad beating from a
>serious person knows
that it is a much more frightening and >horrible experience
than it is
presented in 99.9% of the >thriller writers. The mental
shake-up is often
much worse >than the physical effects and it can sometimes
be hard to >shake
off. Only a few of the hardboiled school strike me as >able
to communicate
this.
John D. McDonald used to cover this ground as it was something
of a stock-in-
trade for Travis McGee to deliver psychological ass-whuppings.
James W. Hall,
who I haven't seen discussed here, but is actually somewhat
evocative of
Willeford, also does a pretty good job of conveying the
message.
One of Hall's similarity's to CW, aside from the South Fla
settings that are
found in the Hokes, are his Troy Louden and Jr Frengeresque bad
guys. In one
of his books, the bad guy has a pain threshold of absolute
zero. In another,
or heck perhaps even the same one, everything runs together in
my mind these
days, the bad guy is dissolved in a vat of some kind of weird
substance,
except for his eyeballs, which end up floating on the
surface.
Hall teaches fiction writing at one of them fancy Fla
yoo-nee-versities. One
of his pupils was Vicki Hendricks, who wrote the very
hardboiled and horny
MIAMI PURITY.
John Lau
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