Mario wrote:
> I'm sure that Gores was aware of the dangers inherent in this type of
> assignment. I haven't read it yet but plan to do so. It's a tough
> thing to do and you will be damned if you imitate too much and damned
> if you use a little freedom...
As Lawrence Block (William Irish), Robert Goldsborough (Rex Stout),
Robert Parker (Raymond Chandler) and a slew of others have found out,
when picking up the trail of dead writers.
I feel particularly sorry, in a way, for Parker, because the typical
expected backlash was complicated by the fact that a lot of his
contemporaries already resented his sudden success. And by the fact
that even if Chandler himself had lived to complete POODLE SPRINGS,
the purists -- then and probably now -- would have hated it.
As for PERCHANCE TO DREAM, Parker's second "Marlowe" novel, that
wasn't quite as successful, but as a short story it would have fit
quite easily, quality-wise, into that Chandler Centennial collection,
not as good as some of the stories and not as weak as some of the
others.
More from Mario:
> The case of the late lamented John
> Updike, a gentle soul and a magnificent technician. My secret wish was
> that Updike would one day let it rip and go Quixotic.
Me too. He's one of the few writers I wish had drank more. It would
have been neat to see Updike tie one on, hole up in a cheap motel and
pound out a crime story. Of course, Updike being Updike, it would be
all proper and procedural, but almost every page or so would feature a
phrase or sentence that would just nail the situation.
When he died, I came across a blog about his (numerous) letters to
newspapers over the years. Even when he was ranting about the comic
pages dropping SPIDER-MAN or the new layout of the baseball box
scores, he was always a precise and subtle writer, his wit as gentle
and sharp as an icepick.
As for all that rattling around in the ivory towers about Bloom, I
didn't even know Orlando could read. But books are separated
(segregated) into various categories because that's the way real,
living readers like it. I work in a bookstore and can tell you that
people get plenty rattled when a genre writer they know and love gets
moved to simply FICTION/LITERATURE.
We should remember that all those crime novels that regularly make the
bestseller lists are there not because of a few hundred loudmouth
would-be eggheads like us, but because of the thousands or even
millions of readers who wouldn't be caught dead on a list like this,
and probably think we're all a bunch of egocentric academic pinheads,
prone to turning up our noses at anything TOO popular. Those
mainstream readers are the people who actually buy the books, and make
a book a bestseller, and they'd be pretty pissed off to find Kafka,
Jim Thompson, Jules Verne, Stephenie Meyer and James Patterson all
lumped together in the same section.
Kevin Burton Smith
Thrilling Detective Web Site
"It's Been a Long Time Coming" Edition
Now Online
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