Al,
Re your comments below:
> My own police procedural month experience
was
> disappointing on the whole,
> which is why I haven't posted much. But, for
what
> it's worth, and briefly,
> here's what I read:
>
> Jerome Charyn: MARILYN THE WILD - Don't know
to
> what extent this is a
> procedural. It certainly features cops, but
it
> never grabbed my attention.
> Couldn't finish it.
I've never read Charyn, but your experience corresponds to a
lot of comments I've heard, which may be why I've never tried
them.
> John Wainwright: DIG THE GRAVE AND LET HIM LIE
-
> Jim claims that Wainwright
> "doesn't belt it out of the park every time he
steps
> up to bat." This was a
> fresh-air shot (don't know the baseball
terminology,
> sorry).
Is "fresh-air shot" a Cricket term? And if so, does that mean
you liked it or not? This is a Wainwright I haven't read
yet.
> Ed McBain: KILLER'S CHOICE - One of the early
87th
> precinct novels. This
> one introduces Cotton Hawes. Not one of
McBain's
> better efforts (spoiled by
> featuring, as a key witness, a young child with
a
> ridiculously advanced
> vocabulary).
In a recent article (in fact, it may have been the intro to a
reprint edition of KILLER'S CHOICE) McBain reveals that he
introduced Hawes at the behest of Pocket Books (the origianl
publisher of the series), which wanted a handsome, unmarried
character introduced to take over Carella's
"first-among-equals" position. The theory was that readers
would respond better to a hero who was more like a bachelor
private eye than a suburban schlub, however gorgeous his
wife.
Apparently, McBain had misgivings about this, and it
probably showed in the finsihed book.
> Disillusioned at this point I returned to an
old
> favourite:
> William McIlvanney: LAIDLAW - McIlvanney's
writing
> reeks of authenticity.
> He writes about people and places with
the
> assuredness you might expect of a
> former Whitbread Award winner (DOCHERTY).
> Evocative, realistic, brutal,
> tender and unsentimental - and hardboiled by
most
> definitions. In
> particular, his hard men are
magnificently
> unromanticized. The story: the
> raped and murdered body of a young girl is found
in
> a Glasgow park.
> Laidlaw, assisted by DC Harkness, is given free
rein
> in his search for
> killer. A race against time develops as two
other
> forces, neither benign
> nor legal, join the hunt for the killer.
As you agree about THE LAUGHING POLICEMAN, I agree about
LAIDLAW.
__________________________________________________ Do you
Yahoo!? New DSL Internet Access from SBC & Yahoo! http://sbc.yahoo.com
-- # 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 : 01 Oct 2002 EDT