In a message dated 4/19/09 9:05:22 PM, nevins_mark@yahoo.com writes:
> I have noted that in my few years of mostly-lurking on R-A he has not
> come up very often (Maybe he's not considered hb/noir enough? But some of his
> stuff sure is), and I recognize that his style (especially the fairly
> frequent moralizing narrator) may not be to everyone's taste
>
I don't think I've ever seen a major crime writer's career reputation
the way John D.'s did. And it was only a matter of a few years.
Part of it may be generational. I was reading him back in the fifties
but I noticed, beginning sometime in the eighties, that when I'd give his
books to people in their twenties and thirties, they'd find him "slow."
You also made a good point about him being "noir" enough. The neo-noir
period, which we're in now, is largely the province of street criminals and
street cops. JDM was always interested in the intersection of crime and
the middle-class. That's why The Executioners is such a fine novel. A
comfortable home life destroyed--and changed forever--by the entrance of the
ultimate psychopathic thug.
With the exception of two or three of them, I don't think the McGees
are all that interesting. Certainly the male chauvinism and the moralizing has
dated them but so, I think, has the derring-do. JDM was a hell of a lot
more interesting as a writer when he stuck to his instincts, which combined
pulp crime with a John O'Hara-like facility for the sociology of his time and
place.
Kurt Vonnegut once remarked that JDM was a historian of the fifties and
early sixties. Murder In The Wind and Cry Hard, Cry Fast are just two
examples. The Neon Jungle remains one of the most vivid portraits of post-war
America I've ever read.
I think he's still worth reading and rereading. I wish more people
agreed.
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