The Lady in the Lake, Chandler’s fourth Philip Marlowe novel, gets the private eye out of 1940s Los Angeles and into the California countryside. You would think the hard-boiled detective is just looking for a little TLC after all the murders and blackjacks to the skull, but that’s not his style. Just look at the title! Trouble seems to follow Marlowe like a hangover fart. This is a different kind of Marlowe novel, in my opinion. The previous books featured a more sardonic, cosmopolitan, up-for-anything […]
Even though someone else said it better
I saw a Goodreads description or review that called Cantero the heir to the Terry Pratchett, Douglas Adams throne. Nope to that. The more I think on it, the more I like This Body’s Not Big Enough For Both Of Us, but it’s not the same level of clever, especially since it’s much more limited in the scope of the allusions. The wordplay of Pratchett is not there, nor is the narrative originality, or at least not original in the same way. Cantero’s pretty direct […]
Honeycombed by Grifters at City Hall down to the Flatfeet on the Beat
Alan Hynd was a prolific writer of “fictionalized true crime” stories for the True Crime magazine. Which means he took real cases and created dialogue and filled in the blanks to form a complete story. While the magazines are hard to find, his son Noel has compiled some of his dad’s work into anthologies, of which this is the first volume. The introduction is so sweet. Noel’s love for his dad and his dad’s writing is evident from the start and his genuine fandom […]
Stephen King does a crime thriller.
I wasn’t planning on reading Mr. Mercedes this year. It just sort of happened. And by “it just sort of happened,” I mean that I was looking for audiobooks to feed my audiobook addiction, and saw this was available and then clicked “download,” even though I knew it wasn’t on my list and I would be using it as one of my twenty-five freebies, because I just can’t resist free candy, dammit. I can’t really say I regretted it, though. The universe seems to have […]