Re: RARA-AVIS: Charles Williams

From: Juri Nummelin ( jurnum@utu.fi)
Date: 25 Apr 2000


Bill Crider wrote:

> The article that Richard Moore mentioned is called something like "13 Ways
> of Looking at Charles Williams," and it is indeed by Ed Gorman. It's in
> MURDER OFF THE RACK, edited by Jon Breen.

It's "Fifteen impressions of Charles Williams". "Murder off the Rack" is still available or at least was couple of months ago, when I ordered it through Amazon. Gorman's article is republished in "The Big Book of Noir".

> While a lot of Williams' titles might seem to be capitalizing
> on the "backwoods" genre, the books themselves have little relationship
> to John Faulkner or Erskine Caldwell's work. I suspec the publishers had
> more to do with the titles than Williams did. Didn't John D. MacDonald
> say something like, "Williams is probably the best of us all"?

Having just read three Williams novels, I can say that he was very, very good, but at least in "The Long Saturday Night" the plot is a bit unbelievable or improbable.
"Big City Girl" and "Talk of the Town" are great. I might be able to find some influence of Erskine Caldwell in the former.

Juri jurnum@utu.fi

--
# To unsubscribe, say "unsubscribe rara-avis" to majordomo@icomm.ca.
# The web pages for the list are at http://www.miskatonic.org/rara-avis/ .



This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : 25 Apr 2000 EDT