cool. i never heard of thayer. in fact, i don't think i've ever heard of a male having the first name Tiffany.
i'm familiar with chas fort and this book sounds good, although i would prefer a voice that wasn't breezy, i suspect. what would one call a non-breezy voice?
speaking of voice, i'm still not sure what the fuck don winslow did with Savages and if i loved it, hated it or both.
certainly i enjoyed the story and characters and would recommend it, but he really went for some kind of je ne sai quoi style. at times, i thought of ellroy. at times, ken bruen. i think it got in the way for me, at least sometimes. i realize he was speaking the lingo of socal and mexico and marijuana, but i guess i wasn't sure if he was showing off or was simply good and i didn't like the characters who thought and spoke that way.
i'll still be reading whatever winslow writes, that's for sure.
--- On Thu, 11/25/10, David Rachels <RachelsDA@comcast.net> wrote:
> From: David Rachels <RachelsDA@comcast.net>
> Subject: RARA-AVIS: An Interesting Recent Read
> To: rara-avis-l@yahoogroups.com
> Date: Thursday, November 25, 2010, 12:52 PM
> I saw a reference to Tiffany Thayer
> as an early hardboiled writer, and, knowing of Thayer only
> as the founder of the Fortean Society, I was curious to read
> one of his hardboiled books. Trolling around the internet,
> however, I couldn't find anything that I trusted as an
> authoritative list of his work, and I ended up in Stanford's
> Copyright Renewal Database. There I found, among the novels
> copyrighted by Thayer, Five Million in Cash, which the
> database indicated had been published under the pseudonym of
> O. B. King. This seemed promising, and it was cool to
> discover, upon further research, that no one (prior to
> this!) seems to have connected Thayer to this novel. So you
> heard it here first, folks.
>
> And now about the book: Ben Flinders, an ordinary guy who
> works as a car painter in New York City, gets out of bed one
> morning and finds himself standing ankle-deep in money. He
> has no idea where the money came from, but he decides that
> he will keep it. After this, he proves to be somewhat
> skillful and more than somewhat lucky as he negotiates life
> on the run from two warring mob bosses. Published in 1932,
> Five Million in Cash is a clear forerunner to the Everyman
> noir that became a Gold Medal staple in the 1950s, but with
> one crucial difference: Though the novel features numerous
> shoot-outs and much bloodshed, its voice is so breezy that
> it is impossible to imagine that Ben is ever in any real
> danger. Lightweight, but enjoyable.
>
> Best,
> David R.
> noirboiled.blogspot.com
>
>
>
> [Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
>
>
>
> ------------------------------------
>
> RARA-AVIS home page: http://www.miskatonic.org/rara-avis/
> Yahoo! Groups Links
>
>
> rara-avis-l-fullfeatured@yahoogroups.com
>
>
>
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : 25 Nov 2010 EST