Stupid blurb bait, thoughtless shorthand comparisons

A recent exchange with Benjamin Whitmer on social media included the following:

Nope, nothing like me.

"An invocation of [Raymond] Chandler in a crime fiction review is often more a reflex than it is a thought, like a knee jerk, a fart, or a belch." 

and

Me neither.

"[Cormac] McCarthy's almost one on his own now. I mean, I love him, but every damn book that's not set in a major city is McCarthyian." 

Now it's your turn: What authors are fatuously invoked by reviewers who lack the time or the brains to think about what they read? What is the silliest comparison to another author you have read in a view?

© Peter Rozovsky 2016

Jim Thompson, Benjamin Whitmer, Daniel Woodrell, mood-breakers, a question for readers

I wrote earlier this week that Benjamin Whitmer's novel Pike reminded me of Daniel Woodrell with a tougher edge, maybe with a bit of Jim Thompson mixed in. I had never seen those writers mentioned together, so I was pleased when I picked up a copy of Thompson's Pop. 1280 yesterday and found that it came with a foreword by Woodrell.

"Sheriff Nick Corey is Jim Thompson's greatest creation," Woodrell writes. "Pop. 1280, set in Texas, is so directly a southern novel, so clearly from that tradition, that it would stand high on the Southern Lit shelf (which means high on the Lit Shelf, period) if it were not so consistently misidentified as a work with its roots genre, and therefore arbitrarily reduced in stature. ... The vision is dark but the writing bizarrely hilarious, utilizing the strain of downhome joshing I love so well and learned at the knees of my old ones."

Now, I've been to Texas just once in my life, to Houston and Galveston, and, while my charming hostess does like to say, "Y'all, hush!" I can claim only the most cursory acquaintance with the state, the region, and their quirks and folkways. But I have to think Woodrell is right because fourteen chapters in, Pop. 1280 is dark, hilarious, a stunning performance that sustains its mood in every word, far and away the best of the limited amount of Thompson's work that I've read (Savage Night,  The Getaway, part of The Grifters).

I may have more to say on this astonishing book later, but for now some thoughts on why hard, dark writing may the most difficult kind of crime writing to do well. Here's what I mean: I've read plenty of the hard stuff recently, Thompson, Whitmer, Jedidiah Ayres' Fierce Bitches, Crime Factory's Lee Marvin-themed short-story collection Lee, Eric Beetner, and Blood and Tacos. Lots of that writing is good, some better than that, but what interested me were those stories where a not-quite-right word threw the atmosphere off just enough to take me out of the story, if only for a moment. No author wants to do that, but I suspect the stakes may be especially high in noir, hard-boiled, Southern Gothic, or any other genre that depends heavily on mood.

The slip-up need not be large; all it takes is a bit of jargon or psychobabble, a grammatical error ("Lying still, strapped down tight, the hostage's eyes meet his."), or some annoying quirk of contemporary speech creeping in (level, say, as in "his confidence level" rather than "his confidence.")  

That's me; What are your mood-breakers? What lapses will take you out of a story?

© Peter Rozovsky 2013

Benjamin Whitmer, Talmage Powell, E. Howard Hunt

1) Pike.  I'm no more than a third of the way through this 2010 novel by Benjamin Whitmer, but it has my heart beating faster already. The book is like Daniel Woodrell, but with a tougher edge, maybe with a shot of Jim Thompson mixed in.

2) Talmage Powell's 1962 novel Start Screaming Murder offers, among other things, a compassionate, if somewhat melodramatic, view of "little people" in Tampa, Fla. There are references to midgets and dwarves having flocked to Tampa in the heyday of carnivals and then to some being left flat with nothing to do when the carny era ended.

“Ed, what’s going on amongst the little people in this town, the midget and dwarf citizens who colonized here in the days of the carnies?” one character asks, and I can't help thinking that that relegation of the physical condition to adjective from substantive (dwarf citizens rather than dwarves) is an early example of the verbal sensitivity — political correctness, some would say — under which people with retardation, say, has replaced retarded people in everyday writing.

And I could not suppress a smile when narrator/protagonist Ed Rivers tells the reader that "The midget population of Tampa is sizable."

3) E. Howard Hunt's House Dick (1961) is the best crime novel I've read by anyone who went to become a Watergate burglar. It offers good, tough-guy observations such as:

"It was standard hotel coffee shop food with the usual decorative sprigs of defrosted parsley, but he hadn’t much appetite."

I might not have noted the following had I not known which president Hunt went to work for a decade later:

"Judges are fine; some folks think they’re even necessary. For me they’re guys you tell the story to after all the action’s over. And even then most of the bastards couldn’t tell a crook from a Congressman.” (highlighting is mine)

not to mention:

"Too early in the year for open-air concerts at Watergate."

© Peter Rozovsky 2013