RARA-AVIS: Anyone's My Name

From: Dave ( davezelt@comcast.net)
Date: 01 Jul 2003


By accident I found "Anyone's My Name" by Seymour Shubin and it's a terrific crime/noir novel. It was orginally published in 1953 (a year after "Killer Inside Me"), made the NY Times bestsellers list, and was later re-released in French by Gallimard. This book really should be as well-known as "Killer Inside Me" and it's a shame that it isn't. It offers quite a different view from the mind of a killer. In this one, you have Paul Weiler, a writer for the true-detective mags, although he aspires to be more, to write something worthwhile. When he starts cutting corners in both his professional and personal life, it triggers a sequence of events that leads him to a killing. From this point on, more bad judgement and mistakes doom him. With the heavy sense of irony
(dripping in it, really) in this book, I have to think it's a good example of what Mario likes to call post-noir. I highly recommend it and plan to write an article about it - maybe contrasting it with "Killer Inside Me", for my next Hardluck Stories Zine issue.

-Dave Zeltserman

--
# 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 : 01 Jul 2003 EDT