Joy wrote:Oh, have you read Ellroy's BECAUSE THE NIGHT?
Oh yes! I have read everything up until WHITE JAZZ wich I couldn't read because of the very difficult prose, a lot of tabloid language and stuff...but his first eight are great, among them BECAUSE THE NIGHT...but my favourite is CLANDESTINE, his second, It made a big impact on me and KILLER ON THE ROAD is good too...
...I'm not attracted to gumshoe. So MAN WHO must not be gumshoe, either...
Actually, I don't really understand the term gumshoe, but seriously, I can say that there are similarities between Brew and Philip Marlowe. Both are P.I's and beaten upon but in different ways. Brew carries a lot on his shoulders, and guilt and shame drives him, I would't say that about PM, but both are Knights fighting the Big Evil. The differences are of course there; for instance does Brew has a companion which PM doesn't...
It looks to me that the Extremity of Brew's emotional and physical condition goes beyond what gumshoe detectives are allowed to feel. Am I right in thinking that they have a deliberatly deadened emotional condition?
I don't know, I haven't read that much "classical" crime-stories, maybe in Ed McBain and such...but aren't the P.I. generally a very cynical person who have seen every evil and not being able to do anything about it? Here's where Brew differs as I see it; I don't see him as cynical at all. He is a force of nature in waiting...in one sense a christ-like figure, taking all the blame upon himself and we are left waiting for him to explode. It's that
feeling I get when I read THE MAN WHO KILLED...
kasten