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Old July 30th, 2012 #5
Alex Linder
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Originally Posted by N.B. Forrest View Post
The old Hard Case reprints from the '50s-'70s do. Parker's Summer of Fear features a White racist villain who goes around clubbing muds to death, and his Where Serpents Lie has a White child kidnapper/killer who feeds them to his pet anaconda....but when it comes to page-turner readability, they're good.
I'll look for those. I found some great free old pulps online last year, but I can't remember the guy's name, and it's on my old busted computer. Thing I like is the old writers would give you something. So many of these writers, it's like an exercise. It's not really interesting, it's not really entertaining. The women mystery writers are the worst at this. You just don't get anything from them - no thrills, no entertainment, no education. Whereas a good pulp writer will put you in the pocket of some guy who's traveling the Southern cock-fighting circuit, dealing with crooks and women and rivals - a piece of a world that's interesting and completely foreign to my own. So I actually come away entertained and knowing a little about cock-fighting, something I didn't know anything about. Now that is popular entertainment. Michael Crichton, now dead, was a truly good pop writer, a more recent one. He was an M.D., and he did actual research. He wrote just a brilliant opening set piece in a pirate book that appeared after his death. He talks about the governor of the island performing his morning toilet and damn, it totally puts you in position to really see and feel what it's like to be the man in that position on this sweaty isle. So many writers write as if it's a crime to be entertaining, or someone might catch them being funny.