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Borneo Jimmy posted:So what are your guys' thoughts on Mickey Spillane? When you say Spillane people think Mike Hammer, though he wrote a fair amount of non-Hammer stuff. The Hammer stories are divided into distinct periods, as he'd take a decade off and then write a few before quitting for another decade. I've read five of the initial batch of six Hammer stories (by far the most popular ones) and they're excellent - quick, charged, dirty. A week ago I finished one of his second batch, from the late sixties, and it was seriously disappointing (The Body Lovers). It's an excellent first sixty pages, with a great set-up, before moving to treading-water status and then collapsing with an ending that's just... sad. The character turns rabidly anti-Communist real quick once the Cold War starts. Going to echo the love for John D. Macdonald here. His Travis McGee books are a great deal of fun, but his pre-McGee period is full of great stories that are often wonderful. Once he decided to start McGee, he only wrote something like 3 non-McGee books in the next twenty years, after churning out some twenty or so independent short novels in the ten years prior. I agree that Bright Orange for the Shroud, which I just finished today, is one of the better McGee stories. McGee is a real interesting character in that his first stories come in 1963, which when you're writing about a counterculture figure is comparable to a story featuring a soldier written in 1913. The year before the Beatles hit, and with James Bond only having just shown up in film. McGee is too young to be an old hardboiled guy with a WWII background, but too young to fit in with the hippies. He's happy with free love, yet is curiously moral about certain aspects of it. He likes jazz and hates rock n' roll, is a Korean War vet (not a common thing to hang on one of these characters), but doesn't have any Bondian affections (though he likes gin and a rare pipe). He's an environmentalist in an age where the idea is novel. It's a fun mix of old-fashioned and new that I really enjoy, and I especially like watching him and the times change from '63 (when the first three stories appear) to '85 (when the last comes out). Xotl fucked around with this message at 18:10 on Oct 30, 2014 |
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Oct 30, 2014 05:02
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Professor Shark posted:I'm reading Chandler's short stories, but have been considering writing a Sherlock Holmes pastiche, as many of the ones I listen to in audiobook form are goddamn terrible. I started writing some in part for the same reason. It's amazing how many people miss the basic premises of a Holmes story.
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Aug 19, 2015 04:30
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Oh man, I love the McGee books; wonderful stuff. Like Marlowe, there's always a central problem, but they're not mystery books at all, more an opportunity for McGee to learn and ruminate on society. MacDonald was one hell of a good writer. I think he really shines in a lot of his pre-McGee one-offs. Very, very few are duds.
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Feb 24, 2016 00:38
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Westlake's Somebody Owes Me Money was fun, light fare, leaning towards his Dortmunder style of books.
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Sep 30, 2016 17:34
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DrVenkman posted:What's awesome though is that HCC are about to release a new book from Westlake and it's a riff on Bond. He was approached by Bond producers to come up with a story, and it was set during the handover of Hong Kong. They never used it so Westlake turned it into a book but never got around to publishing it. I mean look at this, it screams 007: Wow, that's literally the third lost last novel by Westlake. I know the guy was prolific, but how of these things did he have lying around?
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Oct 2, 2016 05:07
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PlisskensEyePatch posted:Trying to read Mike Hammer, starting from the beginning, and just can't get into it. Don't know what it is that's putting me off, but it's not clicking for me. If you're not liking it at the start, you almost certainly won't like it at all. The Hammer series is universally considered to be best up during its first run, up through '52 and Kiss Me Deadly. I tried a later one just to see if the consensus might be off (The Body Lovers), and while it started off well, the ending came like Spillane realized he had a novel due that he'd been putting off and wrapped it up in a few hours.
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Dec 17, 2016 23:08
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I never read much Isaac Asimov: just have a very vague high-school era memory of finding early sci-fi rather dry. But he also wrote a series of mysteries called The Black Widowers. They were based on a real social club he belonged to -- the Trap Door Spiders. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trap_Door_Spiders This was a men's only dining club that met once a month, originally founded to get away from a particularly annoying wife of one of the members, that none of the other guys liked (and whom were collectively disliked by the wife). It was basically a chance for a bunch of highly-educated, highly-intelligent guys to sit around and shoot the poo poo over fine wine. Aasimov fictionalized the setting and some of its members and created a fun series of mysteries. Each meeting has a different special guest, and inevitably something comes up for the club members to argue, wrangle over, and try to get to the bottom of. The mystery and the topics of discussion, as befitting someone as absurdly learned as Asimov, vary wildy. I have the first volume. What surprised me right away was how full of life they were. Asimov has a reputation as a bit of a ... functional writer: he always gets the job done, but "verve" is never a word I've seen associated with his work. The Widowers stories are a great deal of fun: the characters come to life, there's plenty of energy, good pacing, and good characterization. Most of the stories were written for magazines, but even so they had a strong element of serialization and continuity, with members referring to previous incidents (both the mysteries as well as smaller bits of characterization). When collected, Asimov tells us in his forward that he tightened this aspect, reducing some of the reintroduction bits of character and background at the start of each story so that it wasn't as tedious for someone reading them all straight through. He adds afterwords to each tale, explaining their genesis, the origins of a story's title, and any corrections made to the text after such and such reader wrote in and corrected Asimov on some point or pointed out a loophole. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Widowers Xotl fucked around with this message at 15:20 on Apr 5, 2017 |
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Mar 23, 2017 17:41
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While I liked LA Confidential, I also found it overstuffed and overall enjoyed The Big Nowhere a lot more. The Black Dahlia and White Jazz, the series bookends, I actively disliked.
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Apr 12, 2017 04:14
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servo106 posted:Has anyone else read the Robert Galbraith books Rowling wrote? Not terribly noir-ish but, overall very solid detective novels with some pretty likable characters. The first two are quite good. The third has a fundamental structural problem that makes it quite dull. The slowly developing realtionship between the two main characters is the best part about the books, and the only good part, I felt, about the third. Tommy_Udo posted:A lot of deserved love on this thread for Chandler and Phillip Marlowe, but no love for Mickey Spillane's Mike Hammer? Kiss Me Deadly, both the film and the novel, are fantastic. I really like Hammer (at least, the good early ones), and have posted about them a couple of times in passing. Oddly enough, I didn't care for the movie, which definitely puts me in the minority. I found it merely watchable. Xotl fucked around with this message at 05:22 on Apr 20, 2017 |
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Apr 20, 2017 05:19
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