: 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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