Paul Duncan wrote:
> Anybody who mentions Fredric Brown, Jerome Charyn,
John Franklin Bardin,
> Marc Behm, Paul Auster, Dorothy B. Hughes, Phillip
K. Dick and Peter
> Rabe in one post is reading the right kind of books
in my opinion.
Charyn in particular is something special. I picked up the
Avon reprint of THE EDUCATION OF PATRICK SILVER about 25
years ago. I'm looking at it right now. The cover shows
Silver in his "filthy soccer shirt." You can't see it, but
he's sticking of Dublin beer and humping around New York City
in black socks and no shoes. Above the title is a quote from
Herbert Gold, who's usually too high on the shelves to
endorse your common cop novel: "Larger than life and full of
life..enlivening, rich in observation..." Almost enough to
scare away a potential reader. But right below Gold, the
Boston Globe calls it "A lead-in-yer-liver cop story," so I
split the difference and I turned to page one.
"Patrick Silver left the baby in the lobby of the Plaza
Hotel. The baby, who was forty-four, sat in an upholstered
chair, with his knuckles in his lap. His name was Jeronimo. A
boy with gray around his ears, a Guzmann of Boston Road, his
education had stopped at the first grade. He lived most of
his life in a candy store, under the eye of his father and
his many brothers. But the Guzmanns were feuding with the
police. They couldn't protect the baby on their own. They had
to put Jeronimo in Patrick Silver's care. Patrick was his
temporary keeper.
"Jeromino had blackberries in his head."
Damn. And it's like that all the way through, staccato jazz
riffs, every other sentence a complete surprise. It's
hardboiled, but not like anything else. Charyn isn't
reheating Hammett or Chandler. He arrives on the mean streets
by way of Outer Mongolia or maybe Alpha Centarus. I'm not
saying he hasn't read the pulps. He probably knows them by
heart. But he isn't imitating them, he's reinventing them,
just as, say, William S. Burroughs reinvented THRILLING
WONDER STORIES. Special.
And here's something interesting -- Charyn doesn't even seem
to be classed as a crime writer. He isn't in William L.
DeAndrea's exhaustive ENCYCLOPEDIA MYSTERIOSA or any other
list or standard reference I've seen. I wonder how he managed
to dodge the bullet. Did Herbert Gold scare everybody
off?
> You
> also know Shane Stevens. How about David Karp,
Gerald Kersh, P J
> Wolfson... Is this the internet version of duelling
banjos?
Naw. I tried reading Kersh's NIGHT AND THE CITY after seeing
the Widmark film version. Didn't get very far before pitching
it, but I was a teenager, so maybe I just wasn't ready. There
was also a pb collection of stories, edited by or at least
introduced by Harlan Ellison, and I read a few of them and
wasn't impressed. Karp and Wolfson I missed completely. Where
should I start with them?
BobT
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