--- In rara-avis-l@yahoogroups.com, "lindenmuthbrian" <blindenmuth@...> wrote:
>
> Is anyone really surprised?
>
> Here is James Ellroy from the New Author Introduction to the 1995 Arrow edition of Brown's Requiem.
>
> "Brown's Requiem is heavily beholden to Raymond Chandler — an icon I've come to dislike quite a bit. Big Ray was a true original who created a truly original style that lazy-assed writers have been imitating with some success for many years. I owe Ray a two-fold debt: he got me going, and he showed me that imitating him was a dead-end street on GenreHack Boulevard."
>
This strikes me as a sincere statement. You can be infatuated with some model when you start out, then realize that it's a dead end. It happens frequently. For example, all the guys who set out to imitate Jorge Luis Borges had to turn elsewhere after writing a few imitative stories. Borges himself set out to imitate Franz Kafka after he discovered him, another dead end because Borges is ironic and Kafka is something else, you can't be sure that he was not serious.
Parker set out to imitate Chandler and he did imitate him well for a while. After that, he should have dropped Chandlerism, which (and in this I agree with Ellroy) can get tiresome.
Best,
mrt
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