RARA-AVIS: Re: An Andy Rooney Moment

From: ssshapir ( ssshapir@yahoo.com)
Date: 25 May 2008


Some of my favourite detective fiction is pretty softboiled. Has anyone read the Boruvka stories of Josef Skvorecky? Sublime stuff.
(Skvorecky, incidentally, translated Chandler into Czech, so he knows a thing or two about genre. 'Miss Silver's Past' and 'The Miracle Game', while both very literary works--Nobel prize-winning territory as far as I'm concerned--are at heart (or should that be in the stomach?) detective thrillers.

And as for hardboiled--it crops up in Alfred Bester's sci-fi all the time. If you ignore the trappings of robots and space ships and such, what you're really reading is a punchy, pacey Hammettesque thriller.



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