I too read Brown's Requim (sp?), and to be honest I thought
it was sludge,
I had already read The Black Dahlia (and others,) and was
impressed by his
maniacal lyricism. When I found a copy of Brown's, I grabbed
it--and
discovered he was pretty damn lucky to get it published. To
me, it reads
like it was written by a high schooler on speed. If he
thought he was
mimicking Chandler--the shock when he woke up must have been
massive.
His ego is remarkably large. He must truly resent Chandler
for paving the
way. Yes, I said, paving the way. Hammett and the rest of the
Black Mask
boys wrote first, but they didn't have all the literary
baggage that
Chandler insisted the PI novel could carry. (If it weren't so
pure and
mythically poignant, Chandler's remark about "Down these mean
streets . .
. " would sound pompous, arrogant--you get the picture.
I think much of the criticism about the PI genre being a
rehash of
Chandler is true, Sue Grafton (rara-viis' most favorite femme
fatale)
said in Publishers Weekly last spring "Fantasy is the Great
Equalizer."
For many writers, the PI is a Fantasy, and they are writing
their fantasy
POV of the mean streets. Too many unfortunately never set
foot on a mean
street in their lives, unless the cabbie dropped them off a
block before
their hotel. And this shows. Chandler, for all his lit-crit
air,
"imagined" a world of his one that we can buy into and accept
(or at least
suspend our disblief.) In Farewell, My Lovely, he writes
about the 77th
division of the LAPD and of Florian's, a bar in "the dinge
section" of
LA. The 77th in modern (or is it postmodern) LA is Mark
Furman's old
stomping ground, and I believe the LA riots began at Florence
and Central.
Re-reading Farewell now is quite rewarding.
When Time magazine went ape and reviewed Ellroy's American
Tabloid, he
spent much of the beinning of it praising Don DeLillo's
novels.
Ellroy keeps raising his sights. Pretty soon the Sistine
Chapel will have
Ellroy reaching down to Adam...
Yers
Frederick Zackel
Bowling Green State U
Somewhere in Ohio
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