Bill's astute comment about the "astounding explosion of
violence" in THE WAY WE DIE NOW brings to mind the grocery
store robbery in SIDESWIPE. It's a passage I have reread many
times to remind me of how violence should be handled to
achieve the intended horrific effect with the least amount of
exploitation. Here's a sample from pages 238-239 of my
Ballantine edition:
"The checker, except for quivering,
hadn't moved from the moment Troy announced the holdup. Her
face had a greenish pallor beneath her heavy makeup, and
there was a thin ring of white encircling her purple lips.
She began to urinate, couldn't stop, and a large puddle
formed around her feet. Her lips quivered, but she couldn't
make any sound come out of her dry throat as Troy walked
toward her with the shotgun extended in his right hand. When
he was about two feet away, Troy shot her in the face, and
blood and brains erupted from her blonde head. She feel
backward and slid to the floor. With his left hand, Troy
scooped the bills from her register and jammed them into the
pocket of his windbreaker. As he turned back toward the cage,
Randy, crouched low, was on his feet again, hobbling as fast
as he could toward the dairy section at the back of the
store.
Running lightly in his Nikes, Troy
overtook the boy and shot him in the back of the head. The
boy's body fell forward and slid across the clean floor into
a six-foot pyramid of canned peaches. The stack toppled, and
the heavy cans bounced and gurgled on the brown
linoleum."
Willeford's style here is nearly reportorial, in keeping with
the tone of the rest of the book. Notice that he doesn't
break up the action into single-sentence paragraphs meant to
simulate suspense. Each paragraph contains a unified thought
or act. That's total control of craft. This sequence, which
represents just a few pages in a book otherwise devoid
of
"action," is one of the most powerful in the harboiled
canon.
Finally, has anyone here discussed the similarities between
Willeford's Hoke Moseley books and the excellent Mulheisen
books by Jon Jackson? Jackson does a letter-perfect
Willeford, in terms of prose-style, in his novels.
Mulheisen's nickname, "Fang," is the tip-off. Like Moseley,
Mulheisen is identified by his unusual dental problems.
Pelecanos
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