Craig wrote re: Barry Maitland's Kolla/Brock series
>How do they compare to Ian Rankin's books or Peter
Robinson's? (they
> >struck me as being somewhat similar, but am I
correct?)
I agree with Nicole that Maitland isn't hard boiled. Rankin
definitely is hardboiled; I would not call Robinson hard
boiled, either, though "Cold is the Grave" was getting there
(the first half particularly, when Riddle sends Banks on an
"unofficial" errand seems very consciously indebted to
American HB PI fiction); and I have heard that his most
recent book may be even more HB. But essentially the Banks
books are psychological procedurals, more in the Ruth Rendell
or Anne Perry tradition, and I can't stretch my imagination
around Banks as a hardboiled character. They're awesome books
("In a Dry Season" is one of my favorite crime novels of all
time), I just wouldn't call them hardboiled.
Maitland is closer to Robinson than to Rankin, but I don't
think it's a very good comparison in either case. Maitland is
almost completely indifferent to procedure, which is one of
Robinson's strengths. The first two Brock/Kolla books are
even more like amateur sleuth stories than procedurals. And
Maitland just doesn't write hard boiled. The books are rather
dark and fairly violent but they lack that unknown thing,
call it toughness of colloquialism or whatever.
Carrie
-
He got thirty years for lovin' her/ from some Oklahoma
governor,/ who said
"everything this doughboy does is wrong" - Tom Waits
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