On 30 December 2002, Todd Mason wrote:
: As one pretty tired of the oft-expressed anti-short-fiction
bias here at
: RA, the '40s month gave me an excuse (however weak, given
that most of
: its contents are from MANHUNT's heyday a decade later) to
read Leo
: Margulies's 1960 Pyramid Books antho DAMES, DANGER,
DEATH.
Oft-expressed? Surely not. We may have the usual proportion
of people who don't like short stories, but I'd bet it's
better than normal, because people pick up anthologies or
collections of a writer's pulp work and find they like the
length after all. I really liked reading Hammett's shorts,
and I would have read more pulp short stories from the '30s
and '40s over the last two months if I hadn't been pressed
for reading time.
If you're a short-story-disliker, trying getting an anthology
like Pronzini and Adrian's HARDBOILED or one of Jakubowski's
and reading one story in a sitting once a week. The old
writers honed their skills in short stories, and when they
were good, they were diamond sharp.
Bill
-- William Denton : Toronto, Canada : http://www.miskatonic.org/ : Caveat lector.
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