[ QUOTE ]
If there was no disagreement it would be a pretty boring forum, no? Still, I was pretty harsh. Of the later books, I definitely appreciate the ones where Burke has had to evolve more - I'm thinking of the big upset in his life and the subsequent stint in Portland - but it's mainly the way his family is treated that ruins them for me. They stop being real people and turn into plot devices. We need some advice, let's go talk to the Prof; we need a heavy, let's go get Max.
I haven't actually read Two Trains Running. I don't think I've read more than a few of his last seven or eight, and I'm not American so race relations in the corrupt South doesn't have a lot of resonance for me. Good, bad, middling?
In checking which one Two Trains Running was though I noticed that Vachss has a new Burke novel coming out next month, Terminal. I'll probably pick it up after this discussion.
You're in for a treat if you haven't read any Parker before. He's the original professional. The first books are from the sixties and seventies - though they often don't have the dated prose that a lot of stuff from that period has, thanks to the subsequent popularization of their style twenty years later - and then there's a twenty year gap to the next bunch. Richard Stark is the pen name under which Donald E Westlake (yup, the same Westlake who wrote the script for
The Grifters) writes his more noirish stuff.
To diverge for a moment, did you manage to finish Ellroy's The Cold Six Thousand? I have a theory that he was trying to emulate James Joyce's Ulysses with it, and produce something that could be both a masterpiece and virtually unreadable at the same time.
It might be more appropriate in another thread, but given the names I've thrown up, is there anyone I might not have read that you would recommend?
[/ QUOTE ]
Two Trains Running was very good...not quite great, though.
I have not read that Ellroy novel...and since we're talking this genre and you mentioned The Grifters, IMO, no one has come close to touching Jim Thompson.