At 03:38 PM 8/14/00 -0400, you wrote:
>Chinaman's Chance was the first Ross Thomas book I
read under his own
>name (I had read a couple of the Bleeck/St. Ives
books). It blew me
>away and I eventually went on to read all of his
books. And I was
>thrilled that there were further adventures of Woo
and Durant.
My own personal favorite among Ross Thomas series characters
is "Cast a Yellow Shadow." The Padillo and McCorkle stories
are more action oriented than Wu and Durant, which is
understandable given that Padillo is one of the world's best
assassins. A humorous [maybe unintentionally so] aspect of
Yellow Shadow is the continual ranking of assassins, like
something out of a cheesy old western gunfighter tale. My
favorite non-series book is "The Fools in Town are on Our
Side," mainly for the idea that the only way to clean up a
corrupt town is to increase the corruption to the level that
the average citizen rebels.
Someone elsewhere in this thread mentioned the realistic
portrayal of power that is characteristic of Thomas, I think
it's a little different. His characters, both good and bad,
are all complete cynics, or realists, if you yourself are a
cynic. They expect to be double-crossed; no matter what
anyone does, they don't waste time in moralizing, they just
get on with it. The only difference between his good guys and
bad guys is where they draw the line.
Ray
-- # To unsubscribe from the regular list, say "unsubscribe rara-avis" to # majordomo@icomm.ca. This will not work for the digest version. # The web pages for the list are at http://www.miskatonic.org/rara-avis/ .
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : 14 Aug 2000 EDT