John,
Re your comment below:
> I'm reading my books in paperback these days, so
I'm
> a book behind on the
> currents. When posting about Mike Connelly's
LOST
> LIGHT, I didn't mention that I
> enjoyed Elvis Cole's unnamed walk-thru.
>
> I'm now about a third of the way thru Robert
Crais'
> THE LAST DETECTIVE and
> see that he's done likewise with Harry
Bosch.
There are other examples. In one of Warren Murphy's
"Trace" novels there's a scene in which an unnamed Boston PI
comes into a bar that Devlin Tracy frequents, orders an
obscure foreign beer, gets drunk after one sip, and attempts
to engage the barkeep in a discussion about the meaning of
courage.
Robert J. Randisi used to like using other writers'
characters in his books, too. In his early PI novels like THE
DISAPPEARANCE OF PENNY and EYE IN THE RING, Dan Fortune,
"Nameless," and (IIRC) Amos Walker all make brief
appearances.
In DOUBLE by Bill Pronzini and Marcia Muller, in which both
"Nameless" and Sharon McCone attend a PI convention and
collaborate on an investigation, there are walk-ons by Brock
"The Rock" Callahan, Kinsey Milhone, and (again IIRC)
Randisi's own Miles Jacoby.
In one of Benjamin Schutz's later Leo Haggerty books
(MEXICO IS FOREVER, I think), the big DC security agency that
Haggerty managesneeds something looked into in the Bay Area,
so Haggerty contacts Dan Kearney at San Francisco's own DKA
to look into it for him.
Finally, one of my favorite examples. In a SAM SPADE radio
episode called "The Khandi Toothe Caper," Spade calls a
colleague in LA to check on a lead. The colleague is named
"Phil Marlowe," and the actor who plays Marlowe in this brief
sequence is Robert Montgomery, one of the "Gang of Four" who
portrayed Chandler's detective on film during the
1940's.
JIM DOHERTY
__________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Mail
- 50x more storage than other providers! http://promotions.yahoo.com/new_mail
-- # Plain ASCII text only, please. Anything else won't show up. # 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 : 14 Jul 2004 EDT