Patrick King wrote:
>
> Personally, I agree with you completely. I don't
think
> Hammett, Chandler, Cain, Thompson, Gardner,
Charteris,
> Spillaine, Fleming or any of the golden agers
would
> have improved any of their work by pushing it into
a
> 300 page format. But try to tell that to a current
day
> agent or publisher. They won't even read a 150
page
> book without telling you to make it twice as long.
I
> think it hurts the level of writing in
modern
> detective and noir fiction.
>
I completely agree, And for what it's worth at Serpent's Tail
we like a short book. For instance the first two Ken Bruen
novels we published were very short indeed - maybe 30,000
words at a stretch. Of course they didn't sell particularly
well - and that may be cause readers saw them as over-priced
- expecting more pages for their money. I think what happens
too is that readers figure that short crime novels will
be
'literary' and avoid them like the plague. Still if the
ridiculously over-rated Ian McEwan wins the Booker Prize with
his novella On Chesil Beach maybe the short form will come
back into fashion in 'literature' at least. Which may in turn
encourage the drift from 'crime' to
'literature' of some of the major talents working in the
genre. Daniel Woodrell's wonderful Winter's Bone, for
instance, is pretty short, likewise William Gay's Twilight.
Anyone read that?
Also anyone read Willy Vlautin's fine debut novel The Motel
Life? It's more Bukowski/Fante than straight ahead noir,
though Vlautin's lyrics with his band Richmond Fontaine are
often extremely noir.
John
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