Elmore Leonard? Get Real!

[Keith Davis]

In this category of highly readable losers, Fred Exley's "A Fan's Notes"
needs to be included. Reading it again now.

On Thu, Feb 2, 2012 at 5:58 PM, Mark Kohut <markekohut at yahoo.com> wrote:

> Well, if he ain't no genre writer, mostly "mysteries" , then I shoudda
> read more of him.
>
> I got to meet him once. At a book party for one of his books.  I compared
> his unpretentiousness
> as a writer--westerns, mysteries {some fer sure), script doctor--with
> Chekhov's. Chekhov is a
> favorite of mine and I was reading him hard around then. He said nothing
> to this pretentious stupidity
> so I segued into the question I wanted to ask most. I had learned he was
> the major writer/rewriter on
> "Tell Them Willie Boy is Here"...so I asked about the scene where Redford
> meets with Blake under
> a truce flag on a hill....the talk goes nowhere and then Blake says he has
> one more question........
>
> "How you going to get back down that hill?".....he said it just came to
> him (and I think Redford's horse gets shot)
> and then spoke engagingly that  watching westerns as a kid
> he always wondered why no horses were ever killed....(in the movie and
> evidently the book, the Blake
> character aims at horses to avoid killing men)......
>
>
>   *From:* jochen stremmel <jstremmel at gmail.com>
> *To:* Ian Livingston <igrlivingston at gmail.com>
> *Cc:* Mark Kohut <markekohut at yahoo.com>; Carvill John <
> johncarvill at hotmail.com>; "pynchon-l at waste.org" <pynchon-l at waste.org>
> *Sent:* Thursday, February 2, 2012 2:54 PM
>
> *Subject:* Re: Elmore Leonard? Get Real!
>
> 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.
>
>
>
> 2012/2/2 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
>
>
>


-- 
www.innergroovemusic.com
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://waste.org/pipermail/pynchon-l/attachments/20120202/69e46d2a/attachment.html>