Ed,
Re your comment below:
> What happened to that guy with HOT
SPRINGS?
Prior to HOT SPRINGS, he's a sort of gray eminence
(though he doesn't actually appear on stage, having been
killed more than 30 years earlier) in DIRTY WHITE BOYS. In
fact, it's Lamar's dad who kills him, dying himself in the
process. Another book I haven't read yet has Earl Swagger's
son, "Bob the Nailer," and one of the sons of the state
trooper hero in DWB looking into that death.
Earl Lee carries the ball in another novel set in the
"late '40s/early '50s" era called PALE HORSE COMING. No
longer a DA's investigator, he's now in the Arkansas State
Police, from which he takes a leave to try to find a dear
friend who's disappeared investigating an infamous prison
farm for black convicts in Mississippi.
> Up to that point I'd read everything he'd
ever
> written, but with HOT SPRINGS I stopped
about
> halfway.
> All I remember was really, really
atrocious
> dialogue
> and the grotesque overuse of a certain racial
slur.
> Was there any sort of a plot? Did his
subsequent
> books get better?
I have to respectfully disagree with you here. I couldn't put
HOT SPRINGS down, and I found myself rereading portions
several times. The dialog may have been a bit melodramatic,
but I found it convincing in context. It was an unabashedly
melodramatic story, after all. And I thought the action
scenes were great. Further, the hillbily gangster clan, the
Grumleys, were marvelous.
SPOILER ALERT SPOILER ALERT SPOILER ALERT SPOILER ALERT
Had you stuck with it, the book ended with the birth of "Bob
the Nailer," and Earl's getting hired as a state trooper.
Lamar and his cousin, as children, make a cameo appearance in
the last scene.
END SPOILER ALERT END SPOILER ALERT END SPOILER ALERT
I highly recommend HOT SPRINGS, and I found Earl Lee Swagger
to be a character who, more than most, fits Chandler's recipe
for the hard-boiled protagonist.
"He is the hero. He is everything."
JIM DOHERTY
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