RARA-AVIS: Re: LA Noir

From: Carrie Pruett ( pruettc@hotmail.com)
Date: 06 Sep 2001


I wrote:
<< Every other L.A. crime book I've ever read makes me wonder why anyone would stay there for more than a week. >>

and Jim Blue wrote:
> Michael Connelly's LA is a mix of attractive and unattractive. >I've
>always thought that the appeal and the problems with Harry's Bosch's
>mountainside home laid out the yin and yang of LA life pretty well.

Good point. For all the bad dream feel, and the mythic/medieval iconography of Connelly's books (taken over the top in the most recent one, I thought), his series basically feels the most real and most balanced of any L.A. novelists I've read. Yin and yang is a good way to put it. This doesn't necessarily mean he's the best - he doesn't match Chandler's language, though who does? - but it feels most like a real place. And "Angels Flight" is definitely the best L.A. book I've read, maybe the best urban American crime novel, purely as a portrait of its city - "The Sweet Forever" is close, and it's got a special tug because I know DC from real life and mostly know LA from fiction and movies (I've been to Beverly Hills and Burbank, briefly; saw the inside of LAX mostly; doesn't really qualify as working knowledge of the city).

Carrie

_________________________________________________________________ Get your FREE download of MSN Explorer at http://explorer.msn.com/intl.asp

--
# 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/ .



This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : 06 Sep 2001 EDT