"Because Murder is More Fun Away From Home"
Labels: Mike Knowles, Raymond Chandler
posted by Peter Rozovsky at 6:14 PM
This blog is a proud winner of the 2009 Spinetingler Award for special services to the industry and its blogkeeper a proud former guest on Wisconsin Public Radio's Here on Earth. In civilian life I'm a copy editor in Philadelphia. When not reading crime fiction, I like to read history. When doing neither, I like to travel. When doing none of the above, I like listening to music or playing it, the latter rarely and badly. Click here to find an independent bookstore near you.
23 Comments:
Two different times and two different places. I often wondered about some of the clothes Chandler described, but, if everyone is wearing them, a detective might stand out more if he didn't.
As for Knowles, every time you write something new about him, he bubbles a little closer to the top of my list of new writers to try.
Ah, I don't expect serious answers to the question the post's title poses. I was just amused by coming across the two passages in the same week of reading.
Oh, yeah Knowles' stories move fast and hit hard. You might well like them.
To be inconspicuous in this town is to be a busted flush
Is it coincidence that Travis McGee lived on a bost called The Busted Flush? Probably.
Can Mike Knowles reasonably be compared with Raymond Chandler? Probably not.
John D. MacDonald might have been paying tribute to Chandler, but I suspect the name of the boat wad an homage to the hard-boiled milieu rather than to any given story?
Can most painters reasonably be compared to Giotto or most hurlers to Henry Shefflin? Probably not.
A Canadian throwing Henry Shefflin at me?
Doggone it. I fold my cards.
Heh! I keep my eyes open when I travel.
All this praise is going to go straight to my head. It's a good thing we have Solo around to keep me grounded. Kidding aside, thank you so much for the kind words, Peter. I have been a huge fan of your work for a while. You have introduced me to some seriously wicked stuff. It's an honor to be included.
My pleasure, and thanks for the comment. I feel like taking a detour to Hamilton the next time I visit friends and relatives in Toronto.
McGee's boat was named after the hand he was holding when he won it in a poker game. No suit was mentioned nor type of poker being played (five-card, seven-card, Texas Hold-em), at least as far as I can remember.
He won holding a busted flush? Was he a good bulffer?
McGee? Sure. It didn't hurt that his opponent was drunk at the time. I may be mixing it up with a different story and a different character, but I think the first offer to call McGee's bet was the guy's girlfriend and McGee suggested the boat instead.
Now, that makes me want to read the books.
They're now culturally a little dated, at least if you come to them for the first time, but there are plenty of nuggets to be found therein.
I'd still like to take a look. John D. is s gap in my crime-fiction reading. Besides, I read some Craig McDonald, so I'm on a Mc/MacDonald run.
If that's the case, don't neglect Philip MacDonald. His best-known work is The List of Adrian Messenger, but he wrote others. He was also a screenwriter, Wikipedia tells me.
John D. wrote about 40 other crime novels besides the McGee books, you know. Many of them are absolutely brilliant (he wrote Cape Fear, originally titled The Executioners). He also wrote three sci-fi novels.
I have a copy of the book at home. I bought it on the recommendation of one of my previous editors. The editor is gone, but the book remains.
And don't forget Fletch author Gregory McDonald.
Hmm, it might be a fair cotnest between the Mc/MacDonalds and the James as to who had given the world more good crime fiction.
Both film versions of Cape Fear are very very good. Terrifying, but good.
I haven't seen either. I wouldn't mind seeing both.
The quote from Knowles is the detective speaking?
It's chilling... sounds like it comes from the mouth of a man who positively counts on good people doing nothing.
Ah... just read the previous post, and I see he is an investigator for criminals... makes sense now.
May, Wilson is a fixer who works mostly for criminals who act against other criminals. He also works for cops sometimes when the police need something done in a not entirely above-board manner.
The speaker in the excerpt is his uncle, who taught him everything he knows.
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