Dear Bill,
I am not fond of the characters in Fourth Durango; reminds me
of a bad Leonard
(can I say that on RARA-AVIS?)
Cold War swap is in a different mode entirely with more
familiar characters. I give it a "fair" among Thomas' works.
I do not remember the title of the novel, I think it has
Pacific Rim in the title. (Or am I thinking of Chinaman's
Chance?)--any way I think Thomas excells when his "teams" of
semi-disreputable heroes out con the bad guys in complex and
humorous plots. His writing is often as fine as good
narration can be in this mix-up financial crime schemes,
which is unusual in parody/complex comedy works. His earlier,
more dour detective/spy stuff is well-written. But for me,
his greatest talent lies in action humor complex
satire.
Keith
William Denton wrote:
> On 4 May 2000, Bob Toomey wrote:
>
> : Better, actually. And I agree CHINAMAN'S CHANCE is
his best book,
> : with one of the truly great opening lines, right
up there with the
> : first paragraph of Chandler's "Red
Wind."
>
> What do people make of THE FOURTH DURANGO? I picked
it up after seeing
> people recommend Thomas on the list, but it didn't
grab me and I didn't
> finish it. Then again, I was down with a cold at the
time. I've since
> picked up THE COLD WAR SWAP, but haven't read it
yet.
>
-- # 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 : 05 May 2000 EDT