--- Michael Robison <
miker_zspider@yahoo.com> wrote:
> Can you name a couple? This is not a test.
I'm
> just
> interested.
>
It goes like this. Recently, I read a Lawrence Block with his
PI in AA and it was a ghost of a character phoned in by a
sleepy writer. The plot - the mystery or whatever - was
completely forgettable and it felt as if it took longer for
me to read than for him to write it. Tried Sue Grafton who I
hadn't read in a while and her protagonist is just plain
silly and most of the book she drove around with her cadaver
sidekicks propped up in the back seat. Another story of
generic cliché³ unwound one by one. I've heard people suggest
that Grafton is hard-boiled and I'm sorry but that's a
pathetic stretch. Since Laura Lippman trashed Edmund Wilson
on her blog and I'm working on a piece about Wilson, I
figured I'd read this award-winning and highly acclaimed
author. I read "In A Strange City" and could not believe just
how flat-out bad it was. I've two more of her books and a
third on reserve at the library and all I can say is that
while Wilson asked, "Who reads mystery books?" I'm forced to
ask "why?" Dibdin's Aurelio Zen was fun the first time but
after three or four it wore really thin. Basically it's a
cartoon and Venice deserves better. (I read one of his stand
alones and really liked it.) Ken Bruen is popular on this
list and while I haven't read any of his stand alones, his
series about Jack Taylor is - as far as I'm concerned
- a cozy dressed up for Halloween. With Bruen I'm kind of
torn because he's working in a territory that I like but he
just flirts with the border guards. His Irish noir is much
like American film noir (for want of a better term) in that
it looks dark until that happy ending. While I could get
enthusiastic about Hendricks, Abbott and Starr to write
essays on their work, I just can't make it work for Bruen
because that spark just doesn't come across the arc.
Right this moment, I'm rereading The Maltese Falcon before
doing an essay on it as a book to film. One thing that comes
to mind about that how that book is different is that in
almost all recent mysteries it's about the PI as imaginary
friend and not the story that actually says something about
anything. That's what bothered me about the Ross Macdonald
that I dipped into and haven't finished; it had no sense of
place, no real sense of character, it seemed more of a
mystery than anything else.
William
Essays and Ramblings
<http://www.williamahearn.com>
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