Duane wrote:
"any hard boileds here?
"Mark Timlin: sort of. Hard-boiled humorous, following in the
vein of the Thin Man and the Fletch books."
I'm not sure I can go along with this. Although Timlin's
detective, Nick Sharman, can be as much of a smart ass as
Fletch or Cliff Hardy or the early Elvis Cole (and gets about
as positive a response as any of those), he's a lot more
violent than Fletch. He was a corrupt cop who quit just
before he would have been caught. He used drugs, even stole
them from the police lock-up and is known to have a relapse
every now and then. He drinks, his girlfriend/ex-girlfriend
(depending upon the book) is a hooker and he sometimes shoots
anything that moves. Sharman is often compared to Mike Hammer
and he does have certain similarities in the vigilante
department, but as you can tell from above, he's not quite a
pure as Mike. Oh yeah, he kinda blackmails a cop to stay
outta trouble for his more egregious trangressions.
Okay, but are the books any good? Yeah, they're kinda fun,
which is probably where the Thin Man/Fletch comparison comes
back in. Solid genre fare -- nothing more, but most certainly
nothing less. Also contains the occasional interesting twist
from transplanting the US tradition to London, which, by the
way, works a lot better than Mitchum's Big Sleep.
Duane also wrote:
"Ken Bruen: yes. At least two books of his White trilogy are
available in the US."
Agree with you here. I just bought the second in the trilogy,
but haven't read it yet. The first is a trim police
procedural, where crimes are solved more by luck than skill.
In his own way, Bruen has as distinctive a writing style as
Ellroy's in White Jazz.
I've also read several of Bruen's earlier books and was quite
impressed. Rilke on Black (with a cameo by Brant from the
White Trilogy) is a caper book, a kidnapping. Her Last Call
to Louis Macneice is a Jim Thompson-ish tale about a bank
robber whose downward spiral begins after a one-night stand
with a psycho-babe. Then there's The Hackman Blues about an
ex-con who does odd jobs, in this case, finding a white girl
in Brixton. The only trouble is, he's gone a few days without
taking his lithium. And how can you go wrong with the opening
line: "Brady's Bad Fucked!"
Mark
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