Hi All,
Al wrote:
> If I hadn't already read it, your description would
have made me rush
> to the
> nearest bookshop and buy it. Different strokes,
Michael. Not everybody
> likes
> Guinness, nor should they.
Definitely. I LOVE Ken Bruen's books, and the very things
Michael cites are the things I love about them.
As for unneccesary violence...well, one person't unnecessary
is another person's prerequisite. I only call something
unnecessary if it takes me out of the story because it feels
out of place. I personally don't find Ken Bruen's books
unnecessarily anything...except unnecessarily too far apart
(I don't think it's too much to ask for one new Bruen a week,
is it?). My Mum, who also likes crime fiction, WOULD find
them unnecessarily graphic though. Personally, I find the
books she likes have unnecessary cats. And butlers. And
people being poisoned with rare poison from the Three Kneed
Scarlet Guatemalan Tree Frog. And gentility.
While I like noir and bizarre and dark and outrageous and
in-your-face, my Mum prefers vicars and tea parties,
twitching net curtains and poisonings that get solved by
monks or elderly ladies or cats. She once tried a Martina
Cole (it turned out to be The Ladykiller) and rang me up
whispering (god alone knows why she felt the need to whisper,
she was sitting in her own living room at the time) to tell
me she'd just read part of a pornographic book, and she was
shocked. "It had 'lady' in the title, but they weren't,
dear."
My own personal unnecessary usually involves serial killers.
For me there are serial killer books, and then there are
books which just happen to have serial killers in them.
Serial killer books are the ones where you're never allowed
to forget that there's a mad slasher on the loose, where his
bizarre antics dominate the pages, and where I always feel
slightly grubby after reading them - if I actually manage to
finish them. I MUCH prefer the books which have serial
killers in them - while the blood and gore and tortured mind
is ever present, it doesn't overpower the book. These are
books where I think "That was a really good book - oh, there
was a serial killer in it."
Generally, the latter tend to be police procedurals, PI books
etc where the focus is not so much on the dark and devious
mind of the serial killer, and how often he was slapped as a
baby, but on how the investigation into finding him goes, and
the effects on everyone else in the book.
As a genre I don't care for bizarre serial killer books and
films. The more patterns or quirks the killer has, the more
blood is spilled and body parts mutilated, the more good
writing, character development and a decent plot go out of
the window. Some of these serial killer books seem to exist
just for sensationalist purposes. The ones I don't like are
where the author seems to think that making their killer a
murderer of blue eyed women with one arm (the women, not the
murderer), who drowns his victims in an increasingly violent
way in a vat of hot chocolate while narrating The Rhyme of
The Ancient Mariner, drawing a picture of a squirrel on the
wall and scattering rose petals around the bathroom is all
the character development and justification the avid reader
needs. A-ha - the serial killer was burned by a scalding mug
of hot chocolate as a baby, force-fed him by his mother Rose,
a blue-eyed ex Womens Royal Navy sailor who lost an arm in a
bizarre accident involving a rabid squirrel.
Sex is the other thing which is often cited as unnecessary.
Errrrr...if you get my meaning. As for sex in mysteries,
well, if it fits (oo-er missus) then it's fine. But again,
one person's unnecessary may not be another person's.
Sometimes it seems to be put in for titillation purposes.
And, since I do a lot of my reading on public transport, I
don't particularly want to be titillated at 8am on a wet
Monday morning while sitting on the bus next to a drooling
bloke who's oozing curry and beer from every pore. Call me
straight-laced, but...
And many times they slow down the plot. I just want to shriek
at them
"Oh get on with it - and if you're taking me under the duvet,
there'd bloody better be a clue under there."
Finally, there aren't many people who do it well. I read a
cosy mystery a couple of years ago (I know, I'm sorry, will I
be drummed out of rara-avis for that admission?) where the
woman was asleep and the man slid one hand between her thighs
and the other into her mouth. And this was supposed to be
erotic. I'm sorry, but if anyone slides ANYTHING in my mouth
while I'm sleeping, then I'm probably going to dream it's a
chocolate eclair and chomp down hard.
On the other hand, there are plenty of books that do it well,
but I'm not going to mention any of them just in case you
tell my Mum.
And talking of unnecessary, this e-mail has been
unnecessarily tedious. For which, apologies.
Tata,
Donna (Very Much For Sex and Violence)
-- http://freespace.virgin.net/donna.moore
------------------------ Yahoo! Groups Sponsor --------------------~--> In low income neighborhoods, 84% do not own computers. At Network for Good, help bridge the Digital Divide! http://us.click.yahoo.com/S.QlOD/3MnJAA/Zx0JAA/kqIolB/TM --------------------------------------------------------------------~->
RARA-AVIS home page: http://www.miskatonic.org/rara-avis/ Yahoo! Groups Links
<*> To visit your group on the web, go to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/rara-avis-l/
<*> To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to: rara-avis-l-unsubscribe@yahoogroups.com
<*> Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to: http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : 16 Mar 2005 EST