Pieter Johan Pijpers wrote :
> Looking for items about Jerome Charyn with
*Copernic* (works nice) all the
> hits this machine produced about him were in German.
How odd!
Peter replies: Very odd indeed. The Charyn books are, simply,
brilliant. The Sidel books are (in the order they were
written in and, I would argue, the order they should be read
in.)
"Blue Eyes" 1975. Published UK Bloomsbury 1992
"Marilyn The Wild" 1976. Pub ditto 1990
"The Education of Patrick Silver" 1976. Pub ditto 1992
"Secret Isaac" 1978. Pub. ditto 1992
The first 'quartet' - amazing. "Blue Eyes" is like no other
crime book in the world. Incidentally Charyn wrote "Blue
Eyes" in 1973 having read Ross McDonald's "The Galton Case".
He was immediately struck by what he called McDonald's
"particular craft"; his ability to build structures into a
"wild masonry" with "sad strange histories that crept between
the tight closed spaces". Get that - it comes from the into
to the Black Box collection of his books pub in the UK some
time ago.
(Great series that)
"The Good Policeman" Pub. ditto 1990
"Maria's Girls" Serpents Tail/Mask Noir 1993
"Montezuma's Man" Pub US Mysterious Press1994
"Little Angel Street" ditto 1994
"El Bronx" ditto 1997.
"Citizen Sidel" ditto 1999. Plus: Short: "Young Isaac,"
in The Armchair Detective (New York), Summer 1990 Other books
include;
"War Cries Over Avenue C" New York, Fine, 1985; London,
Abucus 1986 Sydney Holden books:
"Paradise Man". New York, Fine, 1987; London, Joseph
1988
"Elsinore" Also non criem but worth a look cos they are
brillaint:
"Metropolis. New York as Myth, Marketplace, and Magical
Land." New York, Putnam, 1986; London, Abacus, 1988.
"Movieland. Hollywood and the Great American Dream Culture."
New York, Putnam, 1989. The best peice about Charyn is:
"Exploding the Genre: The Crime Fiction of JeromeCharyn" by
Mike Woolf, in "American Crime Fiction", London, Macmillan,
1988. (which is worth a look in itself!)
Charyn's account of all this:
"New York is my heartland and the heart of New York is
crime. It is into this maddening heart that I have tried to
enter not as a sociologist, not as a judge, but as a
participant in the city's merciless magic".
I love this guy - it's as simple as that. If you want I'll
send you an article I wrote for Crimetime about him - let me
know off list. Ditto any questions about the books.
Pete
-------------------------------------------------------
"He who lives by the cristal ball ends up eating glass" Jose
Latour
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