<<Mario Taboada offers a comprehensive, but
unfortunately
non-alphabetical, list of authors for Roger Kurtz to find and
read,
and amends it with some more.>>
It was a totally improvised list.
<<Armed with his list, I trolled my
bookshelves and came up with the following additional
authors.
However, I would *not* recommend Spillane to anyone over 18;
the man
was a hack writer of two-page comic-book text stories. (He
never made
it into the pulps, his claims to the contrary
notwithstanding, and I
don't think he even actually wrote real comic-book scripts.
Stan Lee
can't remember any, and he was the teenaged editor of the
Marvel
comics which ran Spillane's text-stories.) If Spillane
belongs on
this list, then so does an unremitting hack like Frank Kane
(who
recycled scenes and bits from book to book) -- and whose
books I
enjoyed more than I did Spillane's.>>
I am not a fan of Spillane; in fact, I intensely dislike
his
protagonists and his general attitude. He was a very
simplistic writer.
The reason I mentioned him is that he wrote with a very
special kind of
power and he understood action =96 besides which, he does
have lots of
fans on this list and his position in the history of the
hardboiled P.I.
novel is secure. If he was indeed a hack, I would say that he
was a
great hack. But then, I had Frank Gruber pegged as a hack
until I
discovered his wonderful westerns.
I did draw my line at Frank Kane, though I did include Henry
Kane, whose
books I'm beginning to appreciate.
I liked your list - Andrew Bergman is a favorite of mine. I
inexcusably
forgot all about him.
Regards,
MT
#
# To unsubscribe, say "unsubscribe rara-avis" to
majordomo@icomm.ca.
# The web pages for the list are at http://www.vex.net/~buff/rara-avis/.