<SNIP>
>As far as new stuff coming out, I really enjoy
Pellecanos' Nick Stefanos
>books. They are as close to hardboiled as you can get
these days. I'm from
>the DC area, and he has the setting nailed
perfectly.
>
>One of the things I love about great crime fiction is
the way the city
>becomes a character in the story. The protagonist in
these books, often the
>lone PI, moves between social strata and ranges the
length and breadth of
>the city. The best authors really bring this to life
-- Hammet's San
>Francisco, Leonard's Detroit, Stout's Manhattan,
Goodis' Philadelphia, etc.,
>jump off the page and surround you.
>
I usually agree, although I recently finished Michael(?)
Stone's Low End
of Nowhere and liked it pretty much, not too cliched in
his
interpretation of the hardboiled genre, but what I liked was
that Denver
was NOT a "character" in the novel. I was prepared to not
like the
writer because to me, Denver just ain't hard-boiled. I know
that Neal
Cassiday and family had some tough times on skid row in the
40's but
with the Rockies and Broncos cleaning Denver up, yuppifing
and
microbrewing, hardboiled just isn't a way to describe the
city to me.
Stone really could be writing about any midsize American
city, which
gives the novel more to identify with.
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