Thanks, Bill, Fred and Jim! The cheques are in the
mail.....
YOUR ALL-PURPOSE HARDBOILED BLURB
And aint it a hoot that the rest of the digest is about
blurbs, too?
Reminds me of a Peanuts strip from years ago, when Snoopy was
trying to
write a hardboiled detective novel.
"You want your book to sell, don't you?" asks Lucy. "You know
what they
always put on the covers of books they want to sell? 'In the
tradition of
Hammett, Chandler and Macdonald' "
Lucy walks away, while Snoopy hovers, pensively, ever the
ambitious sort,
over his typewriter, and then adds in, "and Leo
Tolstoy."
Actually, there's a few other strips in this arc. I got a big
laugh out of
'em at the time, and clipped 'em. Maybe I'll try to scan them
and post
them....
HEY, WOODY GUTHRIE, I WROTE YOU A BOOK...
And while I'm being gracious and all that, thanks, William,
for the bit
about Woody meeting Thompson.
>"'Woody and Jim took to each other like a pair of old
hoboes,' Gordon
>Friesen marvels. 'You could see that they had a lot in
common.' Thompson
>apparently pleased the singer with his knowledge of
Haywire Mac and the
>Texas Wobblies." That's from _Savage Art: A Biography
of Jim Thompson_,
>by Robert Polito.
I'm not sure about Arlo's stance when it comes to crime
fiction, myself,
but he did write one of the early odes to drug smugglers,
Coming into Los
Angeles.
And to tie it all in with hardboiled fiction, with the
endless, it seems,
glut of mysteries with famous literary and historical
characters as
detectives (Jane Austen? Mark Twain? Eleanor Roosevelt?
Groucho Marx?) how
long before someone has Woody and John Steinbeck teaming up
to look into
the particularly nasty murder of some Okie lettuce picker in
the Salinas
Valley?
Kevin Smith
The Thrilling Detective Web Site
http://www.colba.net/~kvnsmith/thrillingdetective/
The January issue is out, with new fiction by Duane
Swierczynski and Hugh
Lessig,
and The 1998 Cheap Thrills awards continue in our P.I. Poll.
What were your
P.I. favorites last year?
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