Terrill Lankford wrote:
Couldn't agree with you more, mrt. Thornburg is a true
original. A terrific writer who appears to be nearly
forgotten now. I know CUTTER AND BONE was reissued about a
decade ago, but I think most of his other books are now out
of print. Someone should come along and do trade paperbacks
of all of them and get this guy the attention he
deserves.
Um, actually at Serpent's Tail we have reissued Cutter &
Bone, To Die In California and Dreamland, they're all readily
available from Amazon on both sides of the pond. We've
stopped at those three as, to my mind, they're his three noir
classics. And, let's face it, we chickened out of reissuing
either the future race-war novel Valhalla, or the incestuous
romance, Beautiful Kate! Of the rest, his first novel
Gentleman Born is an interesting autobiographical coming of
age novel, Knockover is a decent heist novel and Black Angus
a good but depressing book about farm failure. The Lion at
The Door is an OK noir but anything after that I recall as
disappointing, no doubt due to his failing health.
Ah I've just remembered I wrote Thornburg's entry for the St
James encyclopedia. I've pasted it below if anyone's
interested.
John
NEWTON THORNBURG
Newton Thornburg is pretty much the definitive crime
writer as outsider. Nine books in twenty-odd years
obsessively work and rework the same themes. These are
stories of loners with harsh, short names - Hook, Stone,
Cutter, Bone, Crow, Cross - who have had their lives tipped
out of their control, generally by fate, the government or
both.
Thornburg's first novel _Gentleman Born_ marked out one of
his major themes, the family tragedy. Brandon Kendall is the
last remnant of an old money Midwestern family, his father
killed himself, his cousins died in a boating accident when
they were children together, and golden boy Brandon is intent
on going to the bad just as fast and as far as he can.
Gambling and women are his chosen route to oblivion and along
the way he entangles himself in small town corruption. When
the end comes it is bleak and bloody and no surprise
A relatively conventional caper novel, _The Knockover_,
followed and Thornburg's subsequent literary career has
tended to oscillate between these two poles. Family gone bad
sagas like _Black Angus_ or _Beautiful Kate_ have alternated
with seemingly more conventional crime novels like
_Cutter And Bone_ (his greatest success, filmed as Cutter's
Way),
_Dreamland_, or his most recent work, _The Lion At The
Door_.
However the contrast is superficial: all these books are
driven by the same question of how one comes to terms with
unbearable loss. Cutter in
_Cutter And Bone_ was crippled in Vietnam, Greg Kendall in
_Beautiful Kate_ tries to come to terms with his sister's
death following their incestuous relationship, Blanchard in
_Black Angus_ is losing his dream, his farm in the Ozarks,
Kohl in _The Lion At The Door_ has lost both farm and family.
This theme of loss takes flight as an echo of the American
mood post-Vietnam; a sense that the whole country is losing
control, losing sight of its dream.
In his strangest novel, _Valhalla_, this connection is made
all too explicit. It's an apocalyptic novel of a near future
in which America is gripped by race war, and in it
Thornburg's terminal pessimism as to the state of America
leads him into territory uncomfortably close to that
inhabited by the survivalist ultra-right..
Thornburg's pessimism is far more effective in his
crime-based novels like _Cutter And Bone_ and _Dreamland_
whose pace prevents melancholic wallowing and whose cynicism
is all too appropriate to the task of exposing the corporate
roots of American crime. In these two novels particularly,
Thornburg stands as a defiantly individual voice within the
crime canon, bleak and true.
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