Re: RARA-AVIS: Postman Always Rings Twice

Roger Dowdy (rdowdy@sprintmail.com)
Fri, 04 Sep 1998 09:36:31 -0700 MT wrote:
> What I most admire in Cain is his ability to compress the action of a
> story and move it forward relentlessly (but the reader doesn't feel
> choked), with no padding. _Postman_ and _Double Indemnity_ are (at
> least by current standards) very short books, but because of this
> special ability of Cain's to condense the action, they contain much
> more material than novels three times their size.

I agree entirely. This seems to be somewhat of a lost art as most of the
books written in the genre today are well over 200 pages. I'm curious
what those folks more knowledgable than I on the topic believe this is
attributable to?

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