I didn't find Ross Thomas's THE FOOLS IN TOWN ARE ON OUR SIDE
(1970) very gripping while I was reading it, and skimmed some
sections, but after I put it down it became much more
interesting, while I thought about how it fitted into the
times and the genre. The introduction talks about Thomas and
his Chandler heritage. The narrator is a wisecracking,
cynical, hardboiled ex-spy, and in one place he almost quotes
Marlowe's quip about how his bad manners keep up at night.
The Hammett lineage is there too: it's a twisted town-tamer
story, where the narrator busts a town wide open as in RED
HARVEST, not to establish order, but to transfer control from
one set of corrupt bosses to another.
Thomas wrote a lot (it seems; perhaps always?) about the cold
war, and here the narrator is a former spy for a secret
American agency called Section Two. He's seen a lot, he's
been in trouble, he can handle himself. It's a good
background for a tough hombre at that time, and it keeps away
from cliches and nostalgia. It all fits together to make
bizarre but possible people doing something feasible in a
town that could be real. The book wasn't as much to my taste
as I'd hoped, but I certainly admired how it was built.
Bill
-- William Denton : Toronto, Canada : http://www.miskatonic.org/ : Caveat lector.
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