Chris wrote:
>Curious if any of you have read Eric Garcia's
"Anonymous Rex" and what you
>thought of it. It's one of those
Philip-Dick-meets-Chandler novels that's as
>much sci-fi as it is hardboiled -- the subgenre
including "Who Killed Roger
>Rabbit," "Gun, With Occasional Music" and maybe
"Anonymous Brooklyn"
>depending on how you look at it -- the twist here
being that the detective
>is one of a secret society of dinosaurs that survived
extinction and live
>among humans in disguise. Personally, I'm of two
minds about the book.
>Garcia's captured Chandler's prose style quite well,
I think, but I wonder
>if this kind of high-concept re-imagining has lost
its freshness and is
>turning into a "Marlowe with [insert weird postmodern
twist here]" set of
>cliches.
>- --
I haven't read Rex, but several folks in the P.I. POLL this
month on my site considered it the most preposterous P.I.
book they've ever read. And some just thought it was
improbable.
Leaving quality aside, for a moment, I think you do
MOTHERLESS BROOKLYN a disservice to lump it in with the other
books. It's actually a fairly-straight P.I. story, rooted
solidly in the real world, with no word balloons crashing to
the floor, no gun-totin' kangaroos, no undercover dinos. It's
premise (or "twist,' if you will) is that a guy with
Tourette's Syndrome, who's been playing
"private eye" for years, as a sort of scam for his boss,
actually has to become one to solve his boss' murder.
Lethem actually understands the genre, and burrows right to
the core here, and doesn't rely solely on the over-used,
facile trappings of the genre to drive his story.
As for quality, it's a damn good book, challenging, smart and
provocative. I doubt Disney will be making a film out of this
one, though I think they might have options on all the
others....
--
Kevin Burton Smith The Thrilling Detective Web Site http://www.thrillingdetective.com
Now online: The P.I. Poll Grab Bag. Fiction by Laura Lippman, Darren Subarton and Robert Hoyden. And the debut of FEMME NOIR. -- # 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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