As part of a major upcoming project for the literary Web
'zine January
(http://www.januarymagazine.com/),
I've recently been soliciting opinions
from an extensive variety of modern American crime
novelists--from James W.
Hall and Sue Grafton to Jeremiah Healy, Richard Barre, S.J.
Rozan, and Gar
Anthony Haywood. And almost without exception, they cite
Macdonald as a
principal influence, either on their own writing style or on
their original
interest in the genre. As John Lutz told me, "No once since
Macdonald has
written with such poetic inevitability about people, their
secret cares,
their emotional scars, their sadness, cowardice, and courage.
He reminded
the rest of us of what was possible in our genre."
If all this doesn't confirm Macdonald's influence, I don't
know what would.
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