>I think Ward is Canadian, and I think Peter Chambers
is a Brit who
>writes about a American P.I. named Mark Preston. His
real name's
>Dennis PhillipsLaTour is a Cuban who wrote a great
little book
>called OUTCAST, a
>sort of noir tale of betrayal and revenge set in
Havana and Miami's
>Cuban community. It was short-listed for an Edgar,
and it's received
>some pretty good press (including, I must admit, by
me, on the
>January site). Chris Rippen? No idea.
Ooops! That came out truncated. I meant to say:
I think Ward is Canadian, and I think Peter Chambers is a
Brit who writes about a American P.I. named Mark Preston.
Chambers' real name is Dennis Phillips, and if it's the same
one, he's about 76 years old or so.
Sorry about that.
And Mario wrote:
>"Just don't push my shift key, is all. I'm Three
Gun
>Terry."
So, I was hanging out at the Space Bar, when I went for a p,
and I noticed some suspicious characters...
And
>On Vachss: his books have disappointed me totally. He
preaches.
>That's the kiss of death for a work of
fiction.
Well, there are all kinds of kisses of death. Sure, his
ham-handed take on everything flattens everything in its
path, and I think most people, PC or not, don't need to be
convinced very much that child molesters are bad. My problem,
though, with the books isn't so much the unnecessary
preaching, but that the characters are often just big
cardboard cutouts, overly simplistic, gee-whiz! types right
out of bad comic books, whipped up to fill in blanks in the
formula. Maybe if his characters were more developed, his
preachiness wouldn't seem so strident.
And speaking of Three Gun Terry, I sort of see a progression
from Race Williams to Mike Hammer and on to Burke...
And Marianne wrote:
>So I'll be meeting Bill in the flesh...
And my flesh, too, which I believe you've already
met...
-- Kevin -- # 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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