Re: RARA-AVIS: Janwillem Van De Wetering

From: JIM DOHERTY ( jimdohertyjr@yahoo.com)
Date: 12 Sep 2001


Mark,

Re your question below:

> Does anyone have an opinion on this author? What
> are his books like?

He's a former part-time cop in Amsterdam. The cop stuff is pretty authentic-sounding. He's also a Buddhist, and his books tend to have a Zen philosophical underpinning.

> Are they hardboiled?

Well, I suppose they are if you agree with the premise that a police procedural automatically falls, by definition, into the hard-boiled tradition. They are certainly police procedurals. Of course, not everyone agrees with that premise.

On the other hand, van de Wetering is neither as tough, nor as colloquial, as, say, Gerald Petievtch, Joseph Wambaugh, or Dan Mahoney in this country, or John Wainwright in the UK.

A good one to start on, just to see if he floats your boat, is the short story collection *The Amsterdam Cops*. If you don't like the shorts, you won't like the novels. If you do, you'll probably like his book-length stuff, as well.

JIM DOHERTY

__________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Get email alerts & NEW webcam video instant messaging with Yahoo! Messenger http://im.yahoo.com

--
# 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 : 12 Sep 2001 EDT