Re: James Ellroy for the Pulitzer? WAS: Re: RARA-AVIS: Elmore Leonard

From: tieresias@att.net
Date: 22 Jan 2004


David:

I just finished "Fearless Jones." You might give it a whirl. I loved it. It might change your mind about Moseley. I agree with you about Sara Paretsky, for what it's worth.

All the Best,

Brian
>
>
>
>
>
> tieresias@att.net wrote:
>
> > > I haven't discovered a new American writer I've been really excited about in
> > > ten years (when I simultaneously happened upon Cormac McCarthy and James
> > > Ellroy). But, then again, if Leonard or Ellroy don't deserve to win a
> > >Nobel, who in America really does?
> >
> > Two words: Walter Moseley.
> >
>
> I haven't ventured too very deeply into his work. I read "Devil in a Blue
> Dress"
> a long time ago because everyone always crows about it, and then "A Red Death"
> shortly afterward. I hated them both, though. Then I saw the movie for "Always
> Outnumbered, Always Outgunned," which I liked better than the Rawlins stuff,
> mostly because it's not trying too hard to be a mystery (I don't know how
> closely
> it follows the book though; I hated the Denzel Washington "Devil"). About two
> months ago I figured I'd give Mosley another shot--I'm generous that way--and
> try
> one of the later Easy Rawlins books, so I read the short story collection, "Six
> Easy Pieces." Surprise, surprise, I disliked that one too, although I liked it
> better than either of the previous two books of his that I'd read.
>
> He'd be a much better writer if he stopped forcing mysteries into his stories.
> He
> writes bad mysteries, I think, pretty tepid stuff; the kind of painfully
> four-square Chandler knockoffs that people have been doing to death (and doing
> it
> better) for decades. What does interest me in his novels are the oddly
> bourgeois
> dreams and aspirations Easy Rawlins has. On the one hand, he's this negro
> counterculture type (not by any kind of hippie-ness, but by virtue of his race
> in
> a racist society), with the genre's requisite dislike for authority...on the
> other
> hand all he really wants to do is own property and be a landlord. That's
> something you don't see in mysteries every day...or in "straight" fiction for
> that
> matter.
>
> My general take on him is that he's an ambitious (points there) but not terribly
> talented writer who has some perverse fascination for a genre that cripples
> everything that IS good about his writing. I tend to think of him as part of
> that
> wave of 1980s mystery/crime writers who got (and still get) a lot of press as
> previously excluded minorities "redefining" the genre (cf. Sara Paretsky, whom I
> like even less than Mosley).
>
> Also, like Sara P., I find Mosley gratingly, stupidly, almost poisonously
> liberal. Paretsky's much worse with her dopey diatribes, but Mosley is a pretty
> serious offender too. And I'm one who considers himself pretty far on the left,
> too.
>
> David Moran
>
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