How a book for reluctant readers might help reluctant writers, plus a cover photo by me
I've known the author for a few years, and I wrote about her 2008 novel Death Was the Other Woman, a Sam Spade-like story told from an Effie Perrine-like character's point of view. The Dashiell Hammett love continues here. The protagonist is named Nicole Charles, and the book's epigraph is a nod to The Thin Man.
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| Linda L. Richards |
I am one such, and the brevity of these books, plus their stripped-down narrative, vocabulary, or both make it easier for me to see how the authors build their plots and what they do to keep the story going. Since plot is not the strong point of my occasional efforts at fiction, I took mental notes as I read Richards' and Coleman's books. Perhaps other would-be writers who want to learn how to build a story could do the same.
© Peter Rozovsky 2016
Labels: book covers, cover photos, Dashiell Hammett, Linda L. Richards, noir photos, Orca Book Publishers, photography, Reed Farrel Coleman
posted by Peter Rozovsky at 6:54 PM
3 Comments:
Oh, thank you Peter! That's lovely. And I also dig that you got the Hammett homage. If anyone else has, they have not mentioned it to me. (Nic Charles.)
My pleasure. The Hammett homages were a nice bookend to the ones in Death Was the Other Woman. This book used the character name and the epigraph in a not especially Hammett-like story. That book's story was Hammett-like but without such direct tributes, or at least none that I remember. Of course, I was less immersed in Hammett then than I am now, so I might have missed any that you included.
I wonder if Ruth has thought of pitching the Rapid Reads books to, say, beginning fiction-writing classes.
That was a neat trick, keeping the narrative stripped down and basic even with all that stuff going on.
But life at a newspaper that's cutting back and cutting back and cutting back? How could I possibly relate to that?
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