I've read a lot of Dan Simmons' work, largely his horror
novels and recent forays into crime and thrillers. Besides
the Joe Kurtz books, he's also attempted crime thrillers with
_The Crook Factory_, in which Ernest Hemingway attempts to
track a Nazi submarine near Cuba with his fishing boat, and
_Darwin's Blade_, about an insurance investigator.
Besides _Hard As Nails_, the latest Kurtz novel, Simmons also
published _Ilium_ in 2003, the first of a two-part
re-visioning of Homer's The Iliad. It wasn't particularly
noir-flavored, but it was an entertaining, fast read.
A lot of Simmons' work in science fiction, from the titles to
the books themselves, seems to be very allusive in
nature--_Ilium_ references The Iliad, Shakespeare's _The
Tempest_, and Proust's _Remembrance of Things Past_, just to
name a few. The Hyperion books and the Endymion books are
also allusive--_Hyperion_ is structured around the
"pilgrims on a quest" plot of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, for
instance, and I think Simmons was deliberately trying to echo
Keats in the Endymion books. The books don't really fit in
this month's discussion of noir-flavored science
fiction.
Craig Larson Trinidad, CO
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