Thanks for all those kind words. Now I'll tell you a strange,
true
fact. Jim and I, working at different ends of the country,
discovered
Chester Himes, fell into a continuous enthralled state, and
almost at
the same time began writing different kinds of novels about a
black New
Orleans sleuth. Where we tend to part company is that Jim, a
true
intellectual and more widely read than God, tends to take
most of his
influence from French existentialists. Most of mine comes
from Himes,
Donald Hamilton, a snippet of C. L. Moore, Leslie Charteris,
and a dash
of Tennessee Williams. Pretty wierd, huh?
To top it all off, we didn't even meet each other until the
year The
Long-Legged Fly came out and I discovered he was temporarily
living in
New Orleans, not more than a few blocks from me. I knew him
as a Himes
scholar, having read, absorbed, and cataloged his work in a
massive
Himes bibliography I did in the early '90s with the French
Himes
scholar, Michel Fabre. And that's the whole story.
-- ************************************** Robert E. Skinner, Director Xavier University of Louisiana Library 7325 Palmetto Street New Orleans, LA 70125 (504) 483-7303 (voice) (504) 485-7917 (FAX) e-mail: rskinner@mail.xula.edu ************************************** # # 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/.