>> I can't remember who suggested this - evidently
there are varying
>> tastes on here :) - but someone must have liked
it. Any comments?
>
>
>I think it might have been me or maybe Gary Warren (to
suggest it)--we
>both like PI's and the premise is a fine one; however,
and this is a big
>however, it didn't grab me as I thought it would. I
like Mike Stone so
>much as a person that I thought maybe the
disappointment was that I
>didn't go ga-ga over it; maybe I hyped it to much in
my own mind and
>then didn't find it as good as I expected.
It might have been me, too...I really liked the first
one...I'm just
starting it, and I'm sorry it this one turns out to be
lame...
>
>I must admit I preferred Stone's first, The Low End of
Nowhere, but both
>are enjoyable trifles. Streeter's unrepentant
high-school macho is
>mitigated somewhat by his self-deprecating sense of
humor and the fact
>that Stone chooses to make his hero a man's man who
needs a woman,
>Linda, to help him see what's really going on. Not to
give anything
>away to those who have yet to finish the book, but by
the time the big
>plot twist comes it is not much of a surprise, having
been the McGuffin
>for far too many made-for-USA Network and/or Showtime
type,
>straight-to-video movies. There are tons of books I
would recommend
>before this, but for all that, I kind of enjoyed it,
mostly for the
>character Streeter. He reminds me a bit of Kanter's
Ben Perkins, a
>fifties high school-cool kind of guy trying to make it
in a nineties
>world.
Hmmm...like I said, I really enjoyed Stone's first book. Then
again, I
also really liked the Ben Perkins series, one of the few P.I.
series I can
think of where the detective's vast circle of friends and
family play such
a large part without making one want to go run screaming from
the room (I'm
just waiting for fans of the traditional loner P.I. to tell
me that's
exactly what they did). In fact, I think Perkins is one of
the great lost
series of the eighties and nineties, made all the more
amazing by the fact
that the series started as a long string of short stories in
AHMM, EQMM and
Mike Shayne, before breaking into paperback. The closest
comparison I can
think of is The Rockford Files. Picture Jim Rockford as a
younger, more
violent guy, and sometime family man, slap him with a past as
an ex-union
goon, and move him from the California beach to suburban
Detroit.
>
>Stone's short bio in front of the book raised a
question with me,
>though. It said he was a working PI. It got me
wondering how many PIs
>have worked in the genre. Hammett and Joe Gores, of
course, Jerry
>Kennealy (author of the Polo books more of which
should have come out in
>paperback) and, now, Stone. I am pretty sure there are
others, but I
>can't think of any off the top of my head. Can anyone
else?
Well, there's also Nancy Baker Jacobs, who writes the Devon
McDonald
mysteries, and Parnell Hall, who calls himself the "world's
laziest
writer", because his character, Stanley Hastings, does
exactly what Hall
himself did for years, namely working as a P.I. in name only,
while getting
accident victims to sign contracts with an ambulance-chasing
lawyer. If
Hall actually ran into as many loonies and murders as
Hastings does, I
can't blame him for switching professions...
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Kevin Smith
Web & Graphic Design
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