A long-ago “friend” spent all of her free time reading mysteries: murder mysteries, procedurals, hard boiled detectives, cozies, thrillers, suspense, espionage, true crime, legal, noir, capers, and dogs named Pommes-frites. At this time I joined the club and read mystery series’s such as Travis McGee, Spenser, and all of the Ludlum books available at the time. It was a good experience (the books, not the friend) and through the years I have continued to toss a juicy detective novel in with all the classics and contemporaries that filled out my reading lists.
Continue reading “Detectives, Shamus’s, Curious Amateurs”
It’s war time and the City of the Angels is experiencing a great deal of influence and intrigue from religious, communist, fascist, and government operatives seeking to control the population or to overthrown the government or to find loose women to satisfy a sailor on shore leave or just to make a fashion statement in the Barrio.
Those in the business—the literature business—often get excited over a complex and challenging narrative structure which manipulates voice and character and time in often confusing ways. There are excellent examples from Joyce to Nabokov to Faulkner, so many that there was a bit of a backlash against the overly manipulated novel and various forms of minimalism have become popular (have you read Peter Markus: Good, Brother; The Singing Fish; Bob, or Man on Boat?).
A Celebration of Reading 