Chiming in late here with my list. It's tough limiting it to
5 authors, so I'm going to leave out Hammett and Chandler and
Cain and Woolrich because, well, that's almost a list
already.
Richard Stark Michael Connelly James Lee Burke Don Winslow
Laurell K. Hamilton
Actually, I don't know if Winslow would be considered totally
hard-boiled, sometimes you might laugh too much reading him,
particularly the Neal Carey books. He is, however, the kind
of author who can leave you chuckling one minute and gasping
the next. Laurell, as I've said before, has created and
sustained a tough, hard-boiled character and shows no signs
of stopping, so she's an excellent example of a woman writer
right now who's doing this kind of series. I agree that
Woolrich isn't really HB either, but as someone who turned
over a rock and exposed a twilight world of strange and bad
behavior for me at a young age, I'd have to cite him. To the
Ellroy comments, I would agree that he's an important writer
in the genre, although I personally prefer the more coherent
books. I can't think of him now, though, without remembering
when we had James W. Hall for a signing once. He told us that
Ellroy had been drinking some healthy herb that had a lot of
caffeine in it, which he had recommended to Hall. Hall tried
it and was bouncing off the ceiling for days. He said Ellroy
drank quantities of the stuff every day and wondered if it
had something to do with the increasingly hyper quality of
his work.
On the media front, the New Yorker seems to having a
mini-mystery month. A couple of weeks ago they published a
Walter Mosley story, although it was fiction, not mystery.
This week there's a very nice article on Evan Hunter by Pete
Hamill, one grand old grizzled New York guy saluting another.
In it Hunter recites legendary agent Scott Meredith's
definition of pulp fiction. Says Hunter, "He was a brilliant
guy, who hit upon a formula that absolutely defined the
successful pulp story. And in today's world of fiction, most
of the stuff on the market is pulp fiction. John Grisham is
pulp fiction. And Scott defined it perfectly." Here it is,
from Meredith's book "Writing To Sell," still in print:
A sympathetic lead character finds himself in trouble of some
kind and makes active efforts to get himself out of it. Each
effort, however, merely gets him deeper into his trouble, and
each new obstacle in his path is larger than the last.
Finally, when things look blackest and it seems certain that
the lead character is finished, he manages to get out of his
trouble through his own efforts, intelligence, or
ingenuity.
Seems to me that this just about covers it. Did he leave
anything out?
Happy New Year, Bonne Annee, Prospero Anno Felicidad and
Freiliche Neu Jahre (sorry for all the misspellings) to all
you guys and dolls of Rara Avis, who have made reading this
list such a joy for me.
Lastly, would any George Pelecanos or Laurell Hamilton fans
please contact me off-list?
Regards, Martha
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