RARA-AVIS: RE: Wonderful Wizard of Hardboiled

From: dlochte ( dlochte@adelphia.net)
Date: 30 Apr 2002


From: "Carrie Pruett" < pruettc@hotmail.com>

Anthony
>I dunno ... I'm still disappointed that Dorothy Gale
>didn't make it.

Jim:
>When she either:
>a) joins the police force
>b) opens a detective agency
>c) enters the CIA
>or
>d) robs a bank

hey now, storming the witch's castle was quite a caper. and knocking out those guards? of course Dorothy's not hardboiled herself, as her Kansas

farmgirl roots indicate; Dorothy is the femme fatale. But her three friends
- - the yellowbrick road clearly represents the mean street through the corrupt urban jungle; the lion is a lion but he is not himself mean; the

tinman is all metal and yet untarnished, the scarecrow is made of straw the corruptible and transient stuff of mortal life yet when he encounters fire he is unafraid -

and don't get me started on Toto -

carrie

Just to show that no good idea hasn't already been explored, there's a very tough novel based on the Oz legend (Baum's, not HBO's) -- Robert McCammon's "Gone South," in which an Agent Orange-poisoned Vietnam vet, blamed for a murder not entirely his fault, runs from the cops into a Louisiana swamp. There he picks up an assortment of weird and damaged fellow travelers all seeking a mystical swamp witch who can possibly
"cure" them all. It's a terrific book from a writer who seems to have done the unthinkable -- stopped publishing while still hitting the bestseller lists.

Dick Lochte

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