RARA-AVIS: 100 Best Hard Boiled Characters since 1900

From: Joy Matkowski ( jmatkowski1@comcast.net)
Date: 14 Apr 2002


My votes First, some additions to the list: 1. Meg Gardner (series, Jenny Siler; EASY MONEY, ICED), an ex-con moving up in the world from package deliveries to repo work. 2. Casey Jones (series, Katy Munger, BAD TO THE BONE, BETTER OFF DEAD, etc.), tartnoir, unlicenseable (another ex-con) PI with humor. 3. Frank Marvelli and Loretta Kovacs (series, Anthony Bruno (DEVIL'S FOOD, etc.), NJ state employees who hunt down parole violators, with humor. Bruno has another series featuring hardboiled FBI agents, each book starting with BAD. 4. Maureen O'Donnell (GARNETHILL, Denise Mina), incest survivor and months out of a mental hospital, she wakes up with a hangover and finds her psychiatrist boyfriend stabbed to death in her kitchen. For a hundred pages or so, I thought this would be a classic "unreliable narrator." 5. Amos Walker (series, Loren D. Estleman) 6. Arkady Renko (series, Martin Cruz Smith) 7. Bridgett Logan (series, Greg Rucka) 8. Charles LeBlanc(TIDEWATER BLOOD, William Hoffman) 9. Chili Palmer (GET SHORTY and BE COOL, Elmore Leonard) 10. Dan Fortune (series,Michael Collins) 11. Easy Rawlins (series, Walter Mosley) 12. Eva Wylie (BUCKET NUT, Liza Cody) 13. Harry aka Hieronymus Bosch (series, Michael Connelly) 14. Hoke Moseley (series, Charles Willeford) 15. John Rebus (series, Ian Rankin) 16. Kinsey Millhone (series, Sue Grafton) 17. Lew Archer (series, Ross Macdonald) 18. Munch Mancini (series, Barbara Seranella) 19. Shan Tao Yun (SKULL MANTRA and WATER TOUCHING STONE, Eliot Pattison) 20. Tom Bethany (series, Jerome Doolittle)

Not too hard if you're not an English major and don't pay respect to the acknowledged masters on account of you read them a very long time ago and don't clearly remember them. I also deleted a lot of nominated characters that I like very much but just don't think of them as hardboiled.

Joy, who'll have new favorites soon

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