Martin Amis said Elmore makes Raymond Chandler look clumsy, but I read an opening paragraph like the one below and ask what Hemingway or Fitzgerald ever wrote that’s as terse and powerful.
<< The church had become a tomb where forty-seven bodies turned to leather and stains had been lying on the concrete floor the past five years, though not lying where they had been shot with Kalashnikovs or hacked to death with machetes. The benches had been removed and the bodies reassembled: men, women and small children laid in rows of skulls and spines, femurs, fragments of cloth stuck to mummified remains, many of the adults missing feet, all missing bones that had been carried off by scavenging dogs. >>