Then and Now

Strange that the best sellers of long ago continue to be the bestsellers of today. The world of the thriller hasn’t changed much since the eighties when I was heavily into it.

Read Ed McBain’s “Fat Ollies Book”. Heavy handed humor but it succeeded rather well. Very entertaining and very uptodate with references to 9/11, terrorists and all. And we actually get to read the whole of Fat Ollies Book in the novel (all 36 pages of it). The Ed Mcbain I remember was mostly heavy handed police detective fiction, I don’t know when humor started intruding into his writing. Must go back and read his earlier work again. Its amazing that a writer from the fifties has been at it regularly for the last 50 years, producing a book every two or three years. Very different from Mickey Spillane, who wrote in the 50s and 60s too, stopped (except for a book a decade) then came out with “Something down there” in 2003, which flattered to deceive. I liked the beginning, even the name Mako Hooker for the main character (like the shark and Mike Hammer of long ago) – but the latter half and the ending were lifeless. And the book was nowhere near as violent as My Gun is Quick or I the Jury, which were amazing for their time and amazing even now, for the rawness of the violence. These were his first two books and on the recent re-read were stunning. But apart from the violence of his thought process, Spillane never had anything interesting to communicate and his plots were never entertaining. The Snake, One Lonely Night (which started well but degenerated into McCarthyish anticommunism), Survival Zero (total crap) and The death dealers (actually starring a hero called Tiger Mann!) were totally avoidable. The Twisted Thing was a good read for its plot and because the villain is a boy. Am yet to read The delta factor.

Mario Puzo’s Omerta was excellent – unputdownable. As good as his magnum opus The Godfather from the seventies, though written just a few years ago. It does glamorize Sicilian gansters, but that holds true for the Godfather too. Omerta was so good that I re-read and re-enjoyed Godfather. Puzo has written very few books, but whatever he has produced is brilliant. I would never have guessed that Godfather was written so long ago and that too based on events just after the second world war – it could have been written yesterday. A timeless book.