Tuesday, September 13, 2011

An upset in the poll!

It looks like Robert B. Parker won our poll of favorite mystery or suspense writers.

I guess TV detectives are pretty popular. Who knew?
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3 comments:

MamaM said...

The power's not in the pole but the brain that drives it. Parker deserved the win. He may have churned out the books, but he consistently entertained and remained true to character.

September 13, 2011 at 8:05 PM
TTBurnett said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
September 14, 2011 at 12:36 AM
TTBurnett said...

Even though I don't much like the genre, everybody in our house likes Parker for MamaM's reasons. Stylish, tightly-constructed and fun reads, Parker is hard to beat in the light category. His local color is also spot-on.

"Spenser," both the books and old TV show, were, first and foremost light entertainment. As I've said elsewhere, I don't get on with noir in the detective category, simply because it reminds me too much of my real life as a kid. Or at least the lives of the adults around me then. But the Spenser books are great reads to me, because they are obviously unrealistic, escapist fiction.

But if you like Boston color and realistic nitty-gritty, without the affected noir, and certainly not light, the classic is The Friends of Eddie Coyle by the late, very great George Higgens.

The movie is also a classic, upstaging the book for many people. Unfortunately, they didn't get the accents right in "The Friends of Eddie Coyle," as they impressively did in "Mystic River," but everything else in the movie is a perfect telling of a Boston low-life saga, and a kind of prototype for the more haunting "Mystic River" 30 years later. (BTW, an outsider can almost never learn the subtle varieties of local Boston accent. Sean Penn gets high marks in my estimation for his amazing job with one particularly difficult flavor in "Mystic River.")

But The Friends of Eddie Coyle is a great book on its own terms, and well worth a read if you want a realistic portrait of the Boston mobster world of its day.

George Higgens was a much better writer than Parker. A lawyer and U.S. Attorney at the time, he combined Irish storytelling with mordent Yankee wit. This lends his work a kind of objectivity that prevents it from grabbing you emotionally if you're into thrillers, but its bravura literary performance leave you smiling despite the dark and grotesque turns of Eddie Coyle's life. Higgens tried to be something of a 20th century Bostonian Charles Dickens, so, like Dickens, his plots are usually only racks on which to hang character and social observation. This is fine with me. It's much more satisfying to me than the sterile exercise of unravelling tired plots and too-clever-by-half mysteries.

And the good news is that The Friends of Eddie Coyle is available on Kindle! (Just spent $9.99)

September 14, 2011 at 1:18 PM

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