On Fri, 26 Oct 2001, Mark Sullivan wrote:
> As long as we're listing Red Harvest's progeny,
let's not forget
> Westlake's (second? at least under his own name)
Killing Time.
His second novel, yes, and a progeny of "Red Harvest" (which,
in my opinion, is one of the best ten), but not a very good
one. I found it implausible at times and a bit confused. But
the lead character is a very sympathetic corrupt PI, who
wakes up to see what's going on.
As for Hammett's "Harvest", I can understand it is dull to
someone. It's so tense and brief that readers who like deep
characterizations
(bloated, if you ask me) that are so popular in crime and
thriller genre nowadays. But they are wrong and they should
read more Hammett.
I'm currently reading Ellroy's "White Jazz" (the translation
just appeared) and am amazed by how short characterizations
can be. A marvellous book, and actually a good translation,
now I finally understood just how and why some things happen.
In the original version, I was often left wondering what was
going on. Ellroy's scat style is not very clear, but it gets
me hooked everytime.
Juri
-- # To unsubscribe from the regular list, say "unsubscribe rara-avis" to # majordomo@icomm.ca. This will not work for the digest version. # The web pages for the list are at http://www.miskatonic.org/rara-avis/ .
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : 26 Oct 2001 EDT