Carl Hiaasen, Tim Dorsey, W.P. Kinsella, Carl Barks

Nobody mentioned Dashiell Hammet yet. The Glass Key & The Maltese Falcon are where the well-written realist American crime novel began.

Forget Other Authors, take a look at some of their forums.

Guess whose this one comes from:

WE LOVE YOU MICHAEL.i had never read a book all the way to the end, untill i read the poet.it grips you from the first page untill the last. i have read all of your other books,and find them all the same cant wait untill the next is out.

Never thought to check out other author forums.  Which one’s that post from?  Michael Chrichton? I’ve read a lot of his stuff, but I’ve burnt out on those kinds of thrillers.  Reminds me of Dan Brown’s stuff.  I liked Angels and Demons, and The DaVinci Code, but that frantic pace was getting old by the time I read his Digital Fortress.  I’ll lay off that fluff for a while.  I still keep up with Chrichton’s stuff, but they’re not as satisfying as they used to be.  My tastes have changed (thank you Elmore, or maybe I’m just getting old) such that if it’s sold in the grocery store it’s not for me.  A lot of people like that kind of stuff though.  Whatever float’s yer boat, right?

Incorrect, Scrum. But you’re looking in the right direction; it’s an American author.

Here’s something else I found on his forum, leading to question 2: spot the missing element

Jack Vance
Phillip Jose Farmer
Louise Erdrich

djones - 24 February 2007 04:40 PM

Forget Other Authors, take a look at some of their forums.

Guess whose this one comes from:

WE LOVE YOU MICHAEL.i had never read a book all the way to the end, untill i read the poet.it grips you from the first page untill the last. i have read all of your other books,and find them all the same cant wait untill the next is out.

It’s Michael Connelly. I saw him read once (on a bill with Ian Rankin). He seems like an honest, good guy. I don’t know about his books, though.

Which reminds me, Ian Rankin is pretty good. He’s kind of trapped in the single protagonist jungle, but he does the most with it. I saw Elmore Leonard at a reading once and he said that he got advice from John D. MacDonald not to have the same character in every book.

Makes heap big sense no chemotherapy
Every story requires an invention fresh
that’s what make them novel

LOL Slater, always keeping us guessing.

Here’s soome upcoming fiction by proven authors

So what makes an author proven?

Adding another favorite to the growing list:  Poe
As in Edgar Allen.  I have his complete collection of letters, poems and short stories in 2 volumes.  Had it for years and have only read a few things from it so far, but man is it good.  Anyone ever read The Black Cat?  I’ll have to dig it up at home and quote one of my favorite lines from it.

Poe is Quite Big in Europe. ‘The Purloined Letter’ is the one the literati discuss a lot. I have no idea what they say about it. He was an important influence on the French Symbolist movement as well. Has anybody read L’Apres-midi d’un Faune?

Back to the Mystery Forum, the prize goes to Mr McFetridge, who wins the complete works of all the authors on the “Proven” list. With obligation to read them all & tell me if any of them are any good. I know Connelly isn’t. Here where I’m staying, on the Riviera at my sister’s place, my brother-in-law (why are brothers-in-law always such assholes?) has all his books & to pass the time I’m going through them. Connelly is totally lacking in everything we think good about Elmore. He’s just a kind of machine that spits out whodunnit plots. Highly pretentious as well, all the crap about Renaissance painting…

djones - 27 February 2007 03:16 PM

... who wins the complete works of all the authors on the “Proven” list. With obligation to read them all & tell me if any of them are any good. ...

I may read the William Kent Krueger and Charlie Huston but that’s probably about it.

Maybe this is another thread, but another thing in Elmore Leonard I like is the way he works in the information. There’s often a lot of technical detail (I guess a lot of this is Gregg’s work), but it’s usually worked into the books quite naturally and doesn’t stand out like that “pretentious stuff about renaissance painting,” djones mentioned. The bomb stuff in Freaky Deaky, the history in The Hot Kid, the Rawanda stuff in Pagan Babies.

I read Connelly’s “Overlook” serial in the New York Times Funny Pages.  It didn’t make me want to run out and buy any of his books but it kept my interest and I didn’t think it was horrible.  I admit that I would never have read it had Elmore Leonard not preceded him as a contributor.

What an incredible list of great writers. I’ve read too many and know now that I’ll never get around to most others. I find myself going back to the greatest who introduced me to true writing in the first place.

And the one secret they all share is the courage to write with their true voice, breaking rules all the way. Look at the way Hemingway writes simple action or how Leonard creates tone with crazy dialogue, so many imitators but none can find the magic.

Anyway, I’m rereading a lot of stuff at the moment and one of my favourites is a French writer called Antoine De Saint Exupery. Now, stay with me here. A lot of French writing can be insular but Saint Exupery was one of the first commercial pilots of the 1920’s and was shot down and killed by the Nazi’s. And he wrote beautifully. And he had no luck with dames. None at all. (who am i trying to imitate?)

One of his books, Southern Mail was made into a movie by Howard Hawks called Only Angels Have Wings. The movie is a classic and is as close to the book as his adaptation of Hemingway’s To Have And Have Not! Not very, but who cares when you can make movies like Hawks.

The tone and theme of most of my favourite writers like Chandler and Hemingway and Elmore is that life kicks you in the gut and just when you’re finding your feet, kicks you again for good measure. But while you’re down there, staring at your reflection in the gutter, if you can find some beauty, just for a moment, then you might be ok. Saint Exupery, for me, shares their view and their talent to express it better than I ever will. Start, if you like, with The Wind, The Sea And the Stars. If you like that book then you have a pal in Ireland.

Has everybody seen the New York Times obituary of Kurt Vonnegut? It’s the footnotes that are interesting. Or “corrections” as the NYT calls them. Vonnegut is now of course thought of as a ‘literary writer’, so it didn’t matter if the hack who wrote the piece filled his copy with mistakes about mere facts or details. It’s things like ‘themes’ that are important. The hack probably didn’t have to even read the books (as, I must confess, I haven’t), he could’ve just read a book about the books. That’s what it’s like being ‘literary’.

I wonder if any obituarist would make similar mistakes about Elmore?

Correction: the hack was a “her”.

Short stories:

Hemingway
Isaac Babel
Tobias Wolff
Andre Dubus
James Salter
Joseph Epstein
P.G. Wodehouse

Novels:

Joseph Conrad
Evelyn Waugh
Kingsley Amis
Patrick O’Brian
Neal Stephenson
Douglas C. Jones
James Salter
George V. Higgins
Donald Westlake

and

Elmore Leonard