--- In rara-avis-l@yahoogroups.com, "Brian Thornton"
<bthorntonwriter@...> wrote:
>
> Dorothy Uhnak was also a cop.
>
> And Hammett worked as a private detective before actually writing about
> them.
Joe Gores was an agency detective for a long time, too. And the great
Catalan writer Manuel de Pedrolo (author of a huge number of novels,
including several fine noirs and several dark fantasy titles) was a
detective for a while in the Barcelona of the fifties, a grim, noirish
place, the way he shows it. Too bad his work has hardly been
translated (nothing into English, I think, and only some works into
Spanish). Pedrolo was a translator, too, and translated many American
noir and hardboiled novels from the fifties and sixties. He drew
inspiration from the hard-hitting, direct style of the hardboiled
school. In Spain, where roundabout and decorative verbiage is still
considered "good style", Pedrolo is a very notable exception. He knew
what he was doing. Late in his life he was able to publish many novels
that he had had to shelve because of censorship. He acquired a large
reading public and died comfortably off, with at least one book having
sold over a million copies (for a book in Catalan, that is
astronomical, even more so for an excellent book).
Anyway, if someone is adventurous and wants to take a chance with a
publication of Pedrolo in English or another language, I highly
recommend his work. I stumbled upon a couple of his noir novels
several years ago and since then I've read practically all of his
works (ninety plus books, including poetry, essays, short stories and
many novels).
Best,
mrt
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