RARA-AVIS: Richard Barre's Wil Hardesty

Gary Warren Niebuhr (piesbook@execpc.com)
Tue, 29 Dec 1998 10:43:28 -0800 Kevin Smith wrote:
>while Hardesty can't wait to tell us
>everything, sometimes two or three times. Yes, he went to war; yes, his son
>died, yes yes yes, boo hoo hoo...I like a good wallow in a tragic past as
much as the next hardboiled softie
>on this list, but I found Barres' The Innocents, with all its moping, a bit
>too much, and also, considering all the buzz, pretty overrated, and
>definitely suffering from the first-book-blues. A good book, but hardly the
>instant classic I was expecting. Has anyone read the second book? It's
>supposed to be much better, and more tightly written.

I had just the opposite reaction to Hardesty. THE INNOCENTS is about dead
children, and it seemed natural that while investigating a case in which he
is trying to bring back the missing child of another father, Wil would
ruminate on the death of his own son. Perhaps THE INNOCENTS is more on the
literary contemporary fiction side of genre writing, dealing more with
character than some like. However, I have to say that I highly recommend
THE INNOCENTS to anyone yet to try Barre.

BEARING SECRETS deals with the radical movements of the late 60s and 70s in
the US, and THE GHOSTS OF MOURNING deals with the legacy of Vietnam. Each
of these cases requires Hardesty to deal with his own past, and his current
personal life suffers as well. I thought BEARING SECRETS equal in strength
to the first book, and I enjoyed the third as well. If Richard Barre gives
me more of this type of writing into the next decade and I think I will be
happy.

P.I.E.S. (Private Investigator Entertainment Service)
Catalogs of new and used private eye fiction
Gary Warren Niebuhr, Owner
P. O. Box 341218
Milwaukee, WI 53234
piesbook@execpc.com
<http://www.execpc.com/~piesbook/piescatalog.html>
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