I think Gault's putdown was more of Ellroy's choice of
quotation than a general statement of Macdonald's writing. He
clearly loved to needle his friend as when he dubbed Margaret
the real writer in the family. I think he always got a
reaction and that to a kidder that makes temptation hard to
resist. But Gault was also clearly very fond of his old
friend as he made plain in his letters to me.
Richard Moore
--- In
rara-avis-l@yahoogroups.com, "Jacques Debierue"
<matrxtech@y...> wrote:
>
> The toning down of the hardboiled stance in Ross
Macdonald
> may be related to the fact that Macdonald did not
start out in the
> pulps but as a "serious" novelist. He definitely
wanted to be
> taken seriously. His realistic and objective style
is one reason
> why he was taken far more seriously than most genre
writers.
> Another is his constant exploration of the human
psyche, which
> is unusual among PI writers even today.
>
> To an imaginative, protean, cut-to-the-quick writer
like Gault,
> Macdonald must have seemed sterile. Macdonald would
be the
> literary equivalent of Bergman (same story, or
fragments thereof,
> over and over, always solid, always moving, always
the same...).
> Hell, Macdonald is overrated and Gault is seriously
underrated.
> There, the cycle begins all over. Now I'm forced to
read an Archer
> or two to balance the pH...
>
> Best,
>
> MrT
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