Re: RARA-AVIS: Newbie Intro

James Rogers (jetan@ionet.net)
Fri, 24 Jul 1998 21:55:12 -0500 (CDT) At 10:27 PM 7/24/98 -0400, William Denton wrote:
>
>
>We do spend a lot of time on the classics, but lots of subscribers
>have favourite contemporary hardboiled writers. I don't know anything
>about those Prey books, but perhaps you could say what's hardboiled
>about them?
>
>
I would add that this has less to do with any disregard of
contemporary writers than with sheer laziness on the part of some of
us...particularly me. I have to have a new writer just about beat me over
the head - as Ellroy did - before I feel required to read him.
Apropos of nothing,I recently encountered an old female friend
of mine...she still wouldn't sleep with me....who asked me whether I liked
Andrew Vachss. Picqued, I informed her that I thought Andrew Vachss was like
Robert Parker with style and that I found his books indistinguishable from
reading an old Doc Savage novel. This outraged her, as it will a couple of
other folks on this list. I then made the error of asking her if she had
read any Ellroy. She informed me that Ellroy was a florid overwriter who
didn't have anything wrong that a good shrink and a battery of copy editors
couldn't cure . The rest of the conversation was a bit frosty.
Anyway, we do read modern stuff.....if we have to.

James

James Michael Rogers
jetan@ionet.net

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