Vern Smith (via Kerry) says:
>All right, I confess. After giving up on Mickey
Spillane's last two novels
>- - The Killing Man and Black Alley - I started
thinking the so-called Grand
>Master of Mystery had lost his edge. But stop the
presses on this literary
>obit already.
>
>Now, while others will rush to proclaim as much, I'm
not saying Something's
>Down There is Spillane's best. His 1947 debut, I, the
Jury, remains one of
>the finest crime books ever, and a damn tough act to
follow. That said,
>this new one is just as tough to compare to the rest
of the catalogue.
Sheesh. Although I too saw the echoes of Benchley and
Hemingway, I thought Spillane's latest was, well, pretty
uneven, and at times extremely dated. It's almost as if it
was shoved in a back drawer back in the fifties, and dragged
out recently, given a brief, uneven updating (Commies? DVDs
but no cellphones?) and released in time for the holiday
buying season.
It's not a horrible book, and it's not going to ruin his
reputation or anything, but it won't greatly enhance it,
either. Maybe what Spillane needed in this one was actually
more comic book action, not less. Instead I found it all
rather subdued; edgeless if you will, for someone who used to
write with such venom and passion. A shaggy dog story with a
slightly fishy smell. Hammer was at times almost psychotic;
the hero here seems more like just a grumpy old man.
Which is fine -- it's just that I wasn't expecting this
relatively light-hearted adventure yarn.
Still, it's good to have the Mick back, and it's nice to hear
Vern's still out there, too. Kerry, get him to join the
list.
--
Kevin -- # Plain ASCII text only, please. Anything else won't show up. # 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 : 09 Oct 2003 EDT