Mom is nearing the end of her rehab stint (“home” to
assisted living on Thursday) and work has been six different kinds of goofy so
my reading time has deteriorated. The good news is that most of what I did get
to read was first-rate.
Where
the Bullets Fly, Terrence McCauley. Hard to believe he’s my friend. Wide
as his talents range, I should hate him. He’s such a nice guy I don’t, but such
a good writer I’m still tempted. As with his Prohibition-era crime stories and his
University techno thrillers, McCauley makes it all look easy. This is a Western
that pays homage to the glory days of the horse opera while clearly written in
the revisionist period we’re in now, with awareness that was lacking in the 50s
and earlier. This is harder to pull off than it looks (I should know, or my
Western would have been done a couple of years ago) and McCauley does more than
pull it off; he succeeds.
The
Hook, Donald Westlake. Speaking of writers who seem to be able to
anything they want and make it look easy, there’ Donald Westlake. Not a Richard
Stark/Parker novel, and certainly not a Dortmunder, The Hook is a twist on Strangers
on a Train, where a writer who’s successful but blocked hooks up with a
writer who’s fertile but can’t get a contract; together they put one over on
the blocked writer’s publisher. There’s a catch, though, and given my reference
to SOAT you can probably guess what
it is, but the complication is completely original and Westlake’s set-up is so
masterfully done it doesn’t matter that you’ll see the end coming a chapter or
two ahead of time. By then you’ll be wondering less “what” than “how,” and the pace
at which the “how” is revealed will fill you with dread.
2 comments:
Dana – Terrence McCauley’s SYMPATHY FOR THE DEVIL is in my TBR, and I am adding his THE FAIRFAX INCIDENT and WHERE THE BULLETS FLY. His WWI novel, DEVIL DOGS OF BELLEAU WOOD also sounds good to me.
Terrence is always a good read. There doesn't seem to be anything he can't do.
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