The Thin Men
And now, back to our regularly scheduled book-related blog...
A recent Men's Journal magazine did a feature on the top fifteen thrillers of all time. Up near the top they listed Elmore Leonard's "Killshot" but prefaced it by saying that if they hadn't decided to limit each author to one entry on the list, that Elmore might easily dominate it. The surprising thing to me was that he was even on the list, let alone an overshadowing figure.
I'm not writing this to pick on Leonard. He seems to enjoy an incredible reputation, especially among other authors, and is also famous for how-to advice such as his recommendation to leave out the things that readers would rather skip.
The thing is that to me, people like Leonard, Robert B. Parker, and others (I want to try to be less pointed in my criticisms) do what they do well; snappy and realistic dialogue, create interesting characters, have quick-moving plots. But their books come off as thin, the literary equivalent of something skin-deep, a gentle caress versus a deep tissue massage. There's more on the surface than below and the reading, while entertaining, isn't terribly engaging.
I wonder if it has to do with how prolific these writers are. Some of them seem to use the plots over and over again or even borrow from other writers. Most of the writers I'm thinking of have written dozens of books and are very commercially successful. I think at heart the issue is simply that the plots are simply not that interesting. Could it be that they've place so much emphasis on their characters that whether or not they get hammered at night is more important than what they did earlier in the day?
When I read these books, which I do occasionally to confirm whether or not I'm missing anything, it's always the same experience. Fast reads, fun to a point, but at then end I feel like I ate half a dozen doughnuts for dinner: I want more, just not more of that.
Recently Ed Gorman has been talking about (on his blog) how some friends of his find John D. MacDonald's books "too wordy," causing anyone over forty or so to scratch their heads and say, "Huh?" Well, compared to Leonard or Parker, they probably are. I wonder if these guys have been brought along on a steady diet of James Patterson or Dean Koontz or Stephen King popcorn. If that's true, it may be logical to assume that at some point they'd be ready to move past the hors d'oeuvres and move on to a main course of James Lee Burke or even Dick Francis.
Other than that, I'm not sure what "too wordy" means. You expect the plot to move primarily through dialogue? You want pages with more white space? You want fewer pages? I would like to think that keeping one entertained is not something tied to wordiness or word count or anything like that. And that if I do get through a book, it makes more of an impression and satisfies more than teases, than these perennial bestsellers and Thin Men.
A recent Men's Journal magazine did a feature on the top fifteen thrillers of all time. Up near the top they listed Elmore Leonard's "Killshot" but prefaced it by saying that if they hadn't decided to limit each author to one entry on the list, that Elmore might easily dominate it. The surprising thing to me was that he was even on the list, let alone an overshadowing figure.
I'm not writing this to pick on Leonard. He seems to enjoy an incredible reputation, especially among other authors, and is also famous for how-to advice such as his recommendation to leave out the things that readers would rather skip.
The thing is that to me, people like Leonard, Robert B. Parker, and others (I want to try to be less pointed in my criticisms) do what they do well; snappy and realistic dialogue, create interesting characters, have quick-moving plots. But their books come off as thin, the literary equivalent of something skin-deep, a gentle caress versus a deep tissue massage. There's more on the surface than below and the reading, while entertaining, isn't terribly engaging.
I wonder if it has to do with how prolific these writers are. Some of them seem to use the plots over and over again or even borrow from other writers. Most of the writers I'm thinking of have written dozens of books and are very commercially successful. I think at heart the issue is simply that the plots are simply not that interesting. Could it be that they've place so much emphasis on their characters that whether or not they get hammered at night is more important than what they did earlier in the day?
When I read these books, which I do occasionally to confirm whether or not I'm missing anything, it's always the same experience. Fast reads, fun to a point, but at then end I feel like I ate half a dozen doughnuts for dinner: I want more, just not more of that.
Recently Ed Gorman has been talking about (on his blog) how some friends of his find John D. MacDonald's books "too wordy," causing anyone over forty or so to scratch their heads and say, "Huh?" Well, compared to Leonard or Parker, they probably are. I wonder if these guys have been brought along on a steady diet of James Patterson or Dean Koontz or Stephen King popcorn. If that's true, it may be logical to assume that at some point they'd be ready to move past the hors d'oeuvres and move on to a main course of James Lee Burke or even Dick Francis.
Other than that, I'm not sure what "too wordy" means. You expect the plot to move primarily through dialogue? You want pages with more white space? You want fewer pages? I would like to think that keeping one entertained is not something tied to wordiness or word count or anything like that. And that if I do get through a book, it makes more of an impression and satisfies more than teases, than these perennial bestsellers and Thin Men.
posted by Rick Ollerman at 9:36 PM
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