Elmore Leonard? Get Real!

[malignd at aol.com]

You're reading it now?  I read it in 1973 and responded as you're responding.  Oddly, I never re-read it.  I at one point thought it was about theoloogy, but have no idea anymore why.  Does that make any sense to you, as you read it?



-----Original Message-----
From: Charles Albert <cfalbert at gmail.com>
To: Paul Mackin <mackin.paul at verizon.net>
Cc: pynchon-l <pynchon-l at waste.org>
Sent: Thu, Feb 2, 2012 4:45 pm
Subject: Re: Elmore Leonard? Get Real!


I can't imagine what Barth could possibly do in the last 200 pages to thwart Sot Weed Factor's ascent into my top 5.
And he was only 30.
Love,
Cfa
On Feb 2, 2012 4:28 PM, "Paul Mackin" <mackin.paul at verizon.net> wrote:

On 2/2/2012 2:54 PM, jochen stremmel wrote:

Leonard ain't no mystery writer!

And only half Simenon's output are mysteries. Not the better half. And
whoever wants to put Simenon down should read La Marie du Port.


Thriller type genre novels are too full of male cliches. Strong men, protectors of the weak, which often means vulnerable women, gallant followers of the code, self sacrificing, winners.

I prefer to read about "losers," guys (or women)  who may feel locked in by, say,  marriage, family, relationships,  parenthood--people generally without much ambition or energy but still very worthwhile.

There's a continuous flow of literary novels--some a lot better than others--that satisfy my fussy reading preferences, which is why I can't take much interest in singling out America' greatest novelists. For me a novelist is great if he or she has a book out that I haven't read yet.

Also it has to be available on Kindle.

P










12/2/2 Ian Livingston<igrlivingston at gmail.com>:

P.S. If someone said I could take the collected works of only one mystery
genre writer when I was abandoned on a desert island, I think I would
choose Simenon.

I think I'd rather drown. Mysteries are nice, light reading, in which
the unknown becomes somehow known according to minimalist rules. The
real complexities at work in the daily lives, much more the lives of
adventure, get reduced to the meanest of actions complicated merely by
deception, whereas the human mind seeks constantly to reconstruct a
working model of a world in such rapid transition knowledge of fact
becomes nigh impossible. THAT mystery will not be solved by linear
progress, certainly, if it can ever be satisfactorily rectified by any
means at all.

And it is the wallow of that intellectual swale that puts Pynchon,
occasionally McCarthy, Murakami, and a sampling of others out ahead of
Leonard and other mystery writers.



On Thu, Feb 2, 2012 at 9:57 AM, Mark Kohut<markekohut at yahoo.com>  wrote:

Jochen,

Grass came to mind in the early morning because he won a Nobel and his books
were published well in America.
I want to read more of him, but I threw him out as a placeholding question
mark for WHOEVER international
writers our plisters might rate top of the pops...fill it in....

And, as I indicated, I am lightly read in Leonard for no better reason than
that there are so many good writers, so many
good books and I am a slow, albeit voracious, reader.

So, refute away. No one has yet argued against my seeing a bit of a shell
game at work in the essay-writer,m not Leonard

P.S. If someone said I could take the collected works of only one mystery
genre writer when I was abandoned on a desert island, I think I would
choose Simenon. I'd get a whole society, ala Balzac in the 20th Century.
(Unless I was allowed Proust too as non-genre. Then I don't know
who I'd choose.)

From: jochen stremmel<jstremmel at gmail.com>
To: Carvill John<johncarvill at hotmail.com>
Cc:igrlivingston at gmail.com;pynchon-l at waste.org
Sent: Thursday, February 2, 2012 10:03 AM
Subject: Re: Elmore Leonard? Get Real!

What do you think is Chandler's best novel? The Long Goodbye? Compare
it with the Maltese Falcon. It reconfirms a lot of important things
about life in the USA: The business of USAmerica is business; romance
is a worthwile delusion; it's hazardous to sleep with your partner's
wife; women who engage in serial relationships will lie to you when
the truth would do them more good; existentialism is a practical
philosophy for urban males to follow; and if a man develops a
professional attitude towards his work, he will probably succeed where
others fail.

And try to find the point of view in The Maltese Falcon and The Glass Key.

And Mark, would you be so kind and tell me what you have read from
Leonard? And what from Grass?

J


2012/2/2 Carvill John<johncarvill at hotmail.com>:

That piece about Leonard is great, thanks John. He's better than
Chandler, leaner, not as sentimental. Perhaps not better than Hammett.
(Leonard himself said, Willeford wrote the best crime novels.)Yeah, I've
ecnountered this line of thinking before - that Hammett is better than
Chandler. Never could understand it.





--
"Less than any man have I  excuse for prejudice; and I feel for all
creeds the warm sympathy of one who has come to learn that even the
trust in reason is a precarious faith, and that we are all fragments
of darkness groping for the sun. I know no more about the ultimates
than the simplest urchin in the streets." -- Will Durant





 
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