Other books I have read or re-read recently:
* James Crumley's "The Wrong Case" - someone on
rec.arts.mystery posted
an article on having just discovered Crumley through this
book, so I
couldn't resist and went back to it. It's great. The scene
where Milo
shoots down a porch, which then collapses on a really bad
dude, is
unforgettable (which is probably why I didn't remember
it).
* Roger Simon's "California Roll". I had this in the shelf
ready for a
rainy day, my only unread Simon. It's an excellent P.I.
adventure, part
of which takes place in Japan. Moses Wine hires a translator
and writer
who is a rabid fan of the hardboiled mystery, and whose style
and
activities strongly suggest (to my feverish imagination, at
least) that
it may be based on "our own" Jiro Kimura. Jiro, do you know
anything
about this?
* Two by the great Leigh Brackett: "The Tiger Among Us", and
"No Good
from a Corpse", republished in England in the excellent Blue
Murder
series. This lady could really write. I was unable to put
down these
books. I hereby nominate her as the Queen of
Hardboiled.
* "Sleep with Slander" by Dolores Hitchens. This is my first
Hitchens,
partly because I had the idea that she was something of a
hack. Not in
this book, which is a masterpiece of the private-eye genre
(as the blurb
by Pronzini proclaims). I plan to get more of her work.
* "The Dead Seed" by William Campbell Gault. My last unread
late Gault.
This one was quite good, with a good plot and Brock Callahan
a little
less self-assured than he tended to be after becoming a rich
man and
moving to San Valdesto.
* "I Die Slowly" (a.k.a "The Dark Tunnel" by Kenneth Millar).
I found
this Lion Books paperback from 1955 at a yard sale and
couldn't resist.
I had never read this Millar novel, which is closer both to
forties'
noir and to early Mailer than it is to Ross Macdonald. I
suspect a
conspiracy of critics has kept this book somewhat out of
sight - I
highly recommend it, suggesting to the reader that he or she
forget that
this is Ross Macdonald. The cover on the Lion Books edition
is fifties
lurid, with a lady who shares the most visible attributes of
Marilyn
Monroe and Jayne Mansfield.
Regards,
Mario Taboada
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