RARA-AVIS: Bits and pieces, bits and pieces...

From: Kevin Burton Smith ( kvnsmith@colba.net)
Date: 16 Jan 2001


Mark asked:

>Today I picked up a Gold Medal paperback, I'm Cannon -- For Hire by Curt
>Cannon. I looked it up when I got home and found out Cannon is really
>Evan Hunter. So, has anyone read this?

And James (who was in high school when I was still a very young boy in elementary school) wrote:

>There are two Curt Cannon paperbacks from Gold Medal. The other one is
>called I Like 'Em Tough. They're both great.

I agree... Mark, you're in for a treat!

And Kerry mentioned that Howard Engel's Benny Cooperman's:

>a hard little nerd, deep down.

You betcha. On the outside, Benny's a schlubby little guy in an oversized parka,whose biggest pleasure is a glass of milk and a chopped egg sandwich, but inside lurks the heart of a Marlowe. It's just so hard to tail someone when everyone knows who you are... The CBC made two decent TV movies about him (after doing a string of radio shows), all starring Saul Rubineck (Daphne's fiancee from FRASIER). At the time, Saul was a little too slim and fresh-scrubbed looking, to my tastes, but now he'd be just about perfect. Maybe Engel should start up the series again.

And speaking of Canadians, Neil Young's dad, Scott, wrote a couple of books about an Inuk cop. As I remember, they were sort of hard-boiled. At least they avoided some of those pandering romanticized sterotypes about Canada that Ted Wood used. And I should mention that Ted Wood , under the pen name Jack Barnao, wrote two thrillers about a hardass bodyguard that weren't bad, a sort of combo of Mike Hammer and Ken Follet.

But, after reading Mordecai Richler's amazing BARNEY'S VERSION, I'm more convinced than ever we should grab him, get him drunk, slap him around, and get him to write THE GREAT CANADIAN HARD-BOILED PRIVATE EYE NOVEL. DUDDY KRAVITZ, P.I., anyone?

-- 

Kevin Burton Smith The Thrilling Detective Web Site http://www.thrillingdetective.com
Now online: The 3rd Annual Cheap Thrill Awards. Christmas Gifts. New fiction by Laura Lippman, Scott Wolven and Anthony Rain. And the debut of Tim Broderick's ODD JOBS. -- # 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/ .



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