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Read (well listened to someone else read) Red Harvest due to this thread. Reading up on it a bit it appears that Kurosawa acknowledged using it (or possibly The Glass Key) as a basis for Yojimbo (the plot similarities are obvious in retrospect). Which is interesting because Last Man Standing is credited as a Yojimbo remake which takes place in ... prohibition America. Kind of have to wonder if the writer/director were familiar with Red Harvest and if so, why they didn't re-interpret that instead. One of the things I disliked about Last Man Standing was that it was so straight forward of a remake of Yojimbo that it lacked personality. Also interesting is that all those derivative stories keep the conceit from Red Harvest of the Con Op - A man with no name. Murgos fucked around with this message at 20:34 on Dec 14, 2015 |
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Dec 14, 2015 18:54
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I've been working my way through Ross MacDonald's Lew Archer series from the recommendations on the first page. I think the first couple of stories in the series do Lew a disservice as Ross MacDonald hadn't really found his own voice yet and was derivative of Chandler (though competently so, they are well written books and good stories) but by the time he is in mid-stride around book 6 or 7 he really is writing some very good stuff. I'd put these, starting at about book 4, above Rex Stout and John D MacDonald but maybe a half step below Hammett and Chandler. Highly recommend. Also, probably helps that the audiobooks I'm listening to are read by Grover Gardner, certainly doesn't hurt. e: At their best the Lew Archer stories are more about the procedure of the investigation, I think. Pulling on all the dangling threads and seeing what unravels. By about 2/3rds of the way through it's usually pretty apparent what's going on but the interesting part is the journey. e2: VVV The ride is certainly down into the depths of the mind of the culprits (and often the victim). If the stories were about bad men/women doing bad things they wouldn't be very interesting. Mostly they are about people who have been exemplary but something has gone very wrong and Lew Archer's journey is more often than not trying to figure out how they got there. Interestingly, the real victim is not always the dead person. The stories are absolutely in the noir genre. e3: Lew Archer is not morally ambiguous so I wouldn't go so far as to say they are Hardboiled stories. Murgos fucked around with this message at 16:00 on Feb 23, 2016 |
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Feb 23, 2016 14:51
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Snapchat A Titty posted:Seriously thanks for the Ross Macdonald books. Lew Archer is a great goddamn narrator. Language-wise v much in the style of Chandler &c. Narrator is used, broken, and dirty, but there's a heart in there, and a sense of truth and justice. Oh god. In The Underground Man he finds the little boy hes been hired to find and instead of sleeping with the woman throwing herself on him he, "gets his sleeping bag out of the car" and spends the night sleeping across the boys doorway. How's that for detective as faithful bloodhound imagery?
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Mar 25, 2016 19:32
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