Bill Crider has been posting very entertaining video on his
blog, http://billcrider.blogspot.com/,
where he has been interviewing folks at Bouchercon, mostly
with this question, along with the choice of Bogart or
Mitchum.
It would be interesting to see how RARA AVIS folks respond to
this. Personally, I put Thompson and Hammett at the top
(although I consider Rex Stout the best pure writer of all
the crime fiction writers of the last 70 years), with
everyone else somewhere below-- Goodis somewhere under
Willeford and slightly above Dan Marlowe. Goodis is probably
a technically sounder writer than Thompson, but Thompson hits
moment of absolute brilliance in his writing that puts him at
a special level--at least for me.
As far as Bogart or Mitchum--with all due respect to Robert
Mitchum, who was great in Night of the Hunter and Out of the
Past, I'd have to pick Bogart in a landslide. Range and
screen presense he showed in Treasure of Sierre Madre,
Maltese Falcon, Casablanca, African Queen, The Roaring
Twenties, The Petrified Forest, The Caine Mutiny, In a Lonely
Place, among many others, could only be rivaled by Cagney,
DeNiro, and maybe Pacino.
RARA-AVIS home page: http://www.miskatonic.org/rara-avis/
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