Re: RARA-AVIS: Newbie Intro

William Denton (buff@vex.net)
Sat, 25 Jul 1998 02:07:06 -0400 (EDT) On Fri, 24 Jul 1998, James Rogers wrote:

: 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.

For me, it's that until I started reading rec.arts.mystery, and later
this mailing list, I had no idea who was good and what modern
hardboiled stuff was coming out. I had _Hardboiled America_ with its
reading list, and then the Black Lizard reprints, and I pretty much
stuck to that because I knew it was all good quality. Modern
mysteries - like any other kind of fiction - are mostly mediocre to
bad, and it's impossible to choose mostly good stuff without getting
good recommendations. I have a list in my notebook of a number of
names I've seen go by here - Michael Connelly and Lawrence Block are
two I've really liked - and over time I'm going to pick up more of the
new stuff. One thing that's great about having all these well-read
people on the list is that they come up with lots of new names worth
investigating. (I thought this Japrisot guy wrote ultra-old fashioned
mysteries, for example.)

Also, some of us are completists and collectors, and if we take a
liking to, say, W.R. Burnett or someone with 40 books and a million
pulp short stories, we spend a lot of time on them and not on more
recent writers. Some of those guys must have written faster than most
people can read.

Bill

-- 
William Denton | Toronto, Canada | http://www.vex.net/~buff/ | Caveat lector.
            "Let's keep the party polite."

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