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Professor Shark posted:Working my way through The Little Sister now, though work has really interfered with my reading. Luckily I have a cold that has laid me out on my rear end, so I hope to finish it off today! If you thought The Lady in the Lake was dark and violent, The Little Sister gets much darker. It's great, though, and it's probably my favorite Marlowe that isn't The Big Sleep/The Long Goodbye. Does anyone else have The Black Lizard Big Book of Black Mask Stories or The Black Lizard Big Book of Pulps? I picked up the Pulps book yesterday, and it's been a delight so far.
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Sep 16, 2014 16:02
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Danger posted:Anyone have an opinion on Benjamin Black's Phillip Marlowe revival? Outside of publisher praise and endorsement from the Chandler estate, the reviews don't seem to be as glowing. It was enjoyable for what it was, but it came off (to me) as Chandler fanfiction. It reads like Chandler, but it's a little sterile - like, Black/Banville is trying his damnedest to write in Chandler's voice and have you believe that Chandler wrote it. And there's also a couple of obvious anachronisms in the dialogue that are a little jarring and too 2014 to have been said by a detective in 1950s LA (nobody referred to cigarettes as "cancer sticks" in the 50s).
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Oct 2, 2014 16:55
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Professor Shark posted:
Playback is certainly worth a read if you're going through all of the Marlowe books and have never read it before. It's the weakest Marlowe novel fully by Chandler, but it's not a bad book. The big criticisms that usually gets lobbed at it is that the plot is less complex than his previous novels (especially coming directly after The Long Goodbye); that Marlowe is at his most cynical and bitter (Chandler, who wasn't in great shape physically or mentally at this point, certainly was at his most bitter and cynical); and that Chandler went more for atmosphere than anything else (which makes some sense, considering it started as a screenplay). On the other hand, it's still well written, not too long, and it ties into The Long Goodbye. And it's got Marlowe being Marlowe.
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Oct 15, 2014 22:35
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What's the gooncensus on the Bernie Gunther/Berlin Noir series? I read the original three years ago and loved them, and I'm binging through the later books. I just finished Field Grey, which was probably one of the bleakest books of the series (and this is a series set in Nazi and post-war Germany).
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Jun 19, 2015 17:39
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I recently finished Qiu Xiaolong's Death of A Red Heroine. He's a Chinese dissident academic living in America, and the book is the first in a series of noirish detective novels set in 1990s Shanghai. It was...interesting. There's something of a Bernie Gunther vibe from the protagonist, Chief Inspector Chen Cao, when he runs up against the Party officials in the precinct and the city. It was really interesting to see police procedure (from the detective's perspective) in a modern one party state, and Chen is written as a poet who took the police job because professional poet wasn't a sensible career choice in Mao and Deng's China. My big gripe was that the prose could be very awkward at times (English isn't Qiu's first language and some of his idiom and word choices are weird), but I'm told it improves as the series goes on.
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Aug 26, 2016 16:35
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Despite being a huge, huge fan of the Bogart film version, I had never read the original novel, Dorothy Hughes' In A Lonely Place. Holy hell, I didn't think it was possible to make that story even more grim, but there you go.
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Sep 28, 2016 16:14
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Ornamented Death posted:Any Lawrence Block fans in here? I finished Grifter's Game a while back and holy poo poo what a nihilistic ending. Block's earlier stuff is pretty nihilistic. The early Scudder novels where Scudder is a full-blown raging alcoholic stumbling across dead prostitutes are really dark. Block also used to be on Craig Ferguson's show all the time and he was unexpectedly cheery and funny as hell.
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Sep 28, 2016 17:02
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Gargamel Gibson posted:The new Bernie Günther is out! I just finished Prussian Blue. Pretty enjoyable and rather bleak, even for a Gunther novel. Thankfully, it returns to (mostly) being set in Nazi-era Germany, rather than the mid-50s South of France of The Other Side of Silence.
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May 24, 2017 15:38
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