RE: RARA-AVIS: Best Last Lines

From: billha@ionet.net
Date: 19 Jul 2000


[Earlier I wrote...]
> If it's not too late to contribute to this thread, just ran across
> a favorite last line of Erle Stanley Gardner's, from one of John Daly's RAce
> Williams stories:
>
> "I sent him crashing the gates of hell with my bullet in his brain."
>
> taken from Dorothy B. Hughes' biography of Gardner.

Couple of folks commented on this, making me realize that I worded it ambiguously (again)... The line, bad or good, is FROM a story by John Daly, and happened to be a favorite line mentioned by Erle Stanley Gardner. Neither the name of the story nor the date is indicated in Hughes' study.

On another note, I was surprised to learn in the same study that Chandler and Gardner apparently had a mutual admiration throughout their careers. I mean everyone knows the story of how Chandler practiced writing a Gardner story from memory to learn how such stories were constructed and his tricks of style, but I didn't know that Chandler continued reading and liking the Perry Masons.

Perhaps this is a case of a writer's reading more widely than his fans?

 Bill Hagen

--
# 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 : 19 Jul 2000 EDT