Ed Gorman's Blog, page 123

Someone is Bleeding/Icy Breasts Richard Matheson

Ed here: This is from Movie Morlocks by Kimberly Lindberg. Someone is Bleeding is one of my favorite bitter noir love stories. As is suggested here it would have been better done by the great French director Claude Chabrol. He owns this turf.


Before Richard Matheson etched out a name for himself as a popular writer of horror and science fiction he dabbled in crime fiction and mysteries. His very first novel was a pulpy noir titled Someone is Bleeding (aka The Frigid Flame or The Untouchable Divorcee) and it features many of the genre’s typical tropes. But Matheson was anything but a typical writer and this psychosexual thriller contains some surprising twists and turns including an ending that would have been right at home in an Edgar Allen Poe story or an EC Comic book from the ‘50s. In fact, after enjoying all the brash and snappy dialogue exchanges in Matheson’s 1953 literary debut you half expect the Crypt Keeper to appear at the end with some kind of funny anecdote to lessen the horror of the book’s final chapter but there’s no simple escape from this grim story. Like many of Matheson’s best tales,Someone is Bleeding leaves readers with an unshakable sense of dread and despair. In Matheson’s imperfect world everyone and everything is suspect. No one is safe and nothing is sacred.

In 1974 French director and screenwriter Georges Lautner adapted Someone is Bleeding for the screen under the title LES SEINS DE GLACE aka ICY BREASTS. His script made many changes to Matheson’s original story but some elements remained the same. Lautner’s film moves the action out of Los Angeles and onto the French Riviera where a free-spirited and rather naïve writer named François Rollin (Claude Brasseur) becomes obsessed with an aloof blond called Peggy (Mireille Darc). At first Peggy forcefully rebuffs his aggressive come-ons but François manages to win her over with his childlike sense of humor and naivety. Their budding relationship is interrupted by Peggy’s overbearing lawyer, Marc Rilson (Alain Delon) who begins questioning François’ intentions and insists on having a gorilla-like doorman (Michel Peyrelon) and chauffeur (Emilio Messina) keep track of the couple’s every move. Complicating matters are the lawyer’s wife (Nicoletta Maschiavelli) and brother (Fiore Altoviti) who claim that Marc is having an affair with Peggy and wants François out of the picture so he can have her all to himself. When a scissor wielding killer starts leaving a trail of dead bodies behind everyone becomes a suspect. François and Peggy eventually flee to the French Alps but just as the carefree François begins to think that he’s capable of breaking through Peggy’s icy façade, his romantic delusions are shattered by a life-threatening revelation.

http://moviemorlocks.com/2013/07/11/s...-
les-seins-de-glace-1974/#more-66208

Room to Swing - Ed Lacy

Ed here: I'm getting addicted to the site Pretty Sinister Books. Though I'm not interested insome of the books reviewed generally the range of material covered (and covered intelligently)is amazing. Here's one of my all-time favorite crime novels covered in Pretty Sinister.
  FFB: Room to Swing - Ed Lacy

I have a thing about the Edgar Awards. I happen to think a lot of the award winners didn't deserve that little statue of Poe. Only occasionally do I come across a truly worthy Edgar winning mystery novel. Room to Swing (1958) won the Edgar for Best Novel. It's most definitely one of the deserving winners. Not only that - it's a little known, little discussed, hardly reviewed at all, landmark novel in the history of crime fiction by a writer who deserves a lot more attention.
Toussaint Marcus Moore is a private detective hired by Kay Robbens, a TV executive, to shadow the subject of a soon to be aired reality TV show that sounds exactly like a 1950s version of "America's Most Wanted." The man, Robert Thomas, is wanted by Ohio police for a rape and assault of a teenage girl and Kay know he is currently living under an assumed name in Manhattan. Moore is to keep an eye on Thomas and make sure he doesn't leave New York until the show is aired. Then Kay hopes some TV viewer will spot Thomas, notify police, and he'll be arrested thus validating the purpose of the TV show and insuring it has a long run. But Thomas ends up dead, Moore is framed for the murder, and he flees the city. Moore is determined to clear his name, but in order to do that he needs to uncover who killed Thomas and why. He figures it's all linked to the rape case.
for the rest go here:http://prettysinister.blogspot.com/se...

BUCHANAN’S GUN by JONAS WARD (BRIAN GARFIELD); Gorman health news

BUCHANAN’S GUN by JONAS WARD (BRIAN GARFIELD)by Fred Blosser

I remember the glory days of Westerns:  They ran on TV every night.  Paperback racks and comic books were crammed with cowboys and gunfighters.  Every big movie star made at least one film where he or she wore a six-shooter and rode a horse.  
Now, the genre increasingly seems to be an e-book niche for diehard fans, and when a Western movie on rare occasions gets a big studio release, it’s more likely to dash hopes of a cowboy comeback than to revive them.  The debacle of THE LONE RANGER is the latest nail in the coffin.  The only question is, how long before Hollywood decide it’s time to plant the stiff in the ground and shovel it under.
In the 1960s, when the genre flourished in paperback form and the only CGI you needed were the CGI your imagination supplied, a writer could make a modest living in the trade.  If he were a young writer like Brian Garfield, he could establish himself in print, hone his talents, and eventually move on to more lucrative crime and thriller fields if he wished.
Many of Garfield’s early paperback Westerns from Ace, Monarch, and Dell appeared under a variety of pen-names, generally variations on his real name.  Brian Wynne, Frank Wynne, Frank O’Brien, and Bennett Garland were all Brian Garfield, before he became famous for DEATH WISH and HOPSCOTCH.
Garfield also wore the “Jonas Ward” house name at Gold Medal Books in a one-shot contribution to the long-running Buchanan series begun by William Ard and then continued by others after Ard’s death.  In BUCHANAN’S GUN (1968), series hero Tom Buchanan wanders into a feud between Arizona cattleman Mike Warrenrode and Apache chief Sentos.
When the Army captures Sentos for rustling, Warrenrode and his hired guns stop the paddywagon and try to seize the Apache.  Warrenrode’s men start a shootout.  Buchanan, an old friend of the chief’s, helps him to escape, but Sentos loses two sons to the gunslingers’ bullets.
In revenge, the Apache circles back to Warrenrode’s spread and kidnaps the rancher’s daughter.  Buchanan and his tagalong partner, Johnny Reo, ride into the mountains to rescue the daughter from the Indian camp.  In the meantime, literally back at the ranch, Warrenrode’s devious foreman Steve Quick hatches his own plot to take charge.
If you’re looking for top-drawer Garfield and have a choice, go first to THE LAWBRINGERS, SEVEN BRAVE MEN, VULTURES IN THE SUN, and THE VANQUISHED.  BUCHANAN’S GUN isn’t in that league, but nevertheless, it’s smooth, fast-action Western formula served up expertly, and if you see it on the second-hand racks, don’t pass it by.  I suspect that the Burt Kennedy/Budd Boetticher movies of the late '50s were a deliberate or unconscious model, including Boetticher’s BUCHANAN RIDES ALONE (1958), starring Randolph Scott as the title character, based on one of the Ard novels.  
Easy to see Scott playing Buchanan again if they'd made a movie of BUCHANAN'S GUN --although as described by Ard and Garfield, the character is closer in appearance to Clint Walker in his TV days.  Easy too to picture stalwarts like Henry Silva as Quick, Emile Meyer as Warrenrode, and Skip Homeier or Richard Jaeckel as Reo, charming but hardly more trustworthy than Quick and his murderous crew.  Garfield’s prose is lean and sharp, and the interplay between his characters shows a more thoughtful approach to characterization than the package would suggest.   Best of all, none of the Apaches wears a dead bird on his head.

NEW FROM FRED BLOSSER  KINDLE  $2.99



Book DescriptionPublication Date: July 6, 2013A collection of fast-action stories in the modern pulp tradition, featuring Ringo & Horn, the Tomahawk Men, Commander Manta, the Gila, and Heroes United. Plus . . . spotlight on three classic pulp masters from the pages of Black Mask and Dime Detective magazines.

GORMAN HEALTH NEWS


The news is in from my stem cell transplant and it's very good indeed.
There is no evidence of cancer and that is amazing. It will come back
of course someday multiple myeloma being incurable, but this is
absolutely the best outcome I could have had--100%.

Thank you for all your thoughts and prayers (and one threat--get better
or else!).

What great friends I have.

Best Ed

Forgotten Books: THE JUGGER by Richard Stark

Forgotten Books: The Jugger By Richard Stark

FORGOTTEN BOOKS: THE JUGGER BY RICHARD STARK

How this for an opener? I'm about to review the worst book Donald E. Westlake ever wrote. Don't take my word for it. Here's Westlake himself speaking.

"I spoiled a book by having him do something he wouldn’t do. The sixth book in the series is called The Jugger, and that book is one of the worst failures I’ve ever had. The problem with it is, in the beginning of the book this guy calls him and says “I’m in trouble out here and these guys are leaning on me and I need help,” and Parker goes to help him. I mean, he wouldn’t do that, and in fact, the guy wouldn’t even think to call him! (laughs)"

I found this quote on The Violent World of Parker website, a goodie. "Westlake has more than once cited The Jugger as a failure, and although I’ve never seen it straight from the horse’s mouth, I’ve heard he considers it the worst book he’s ever written. Well, Mr. Westlake, if this is the worst you can do after cranking out more books than I can count, I am in great envy of your abilities.

"Mr. Westlake is wrong about Parker acting out of character in The Jugger. He seems to have forgotten the details, which is perfectly understandable, as the book was written in 1965 and he probably has not had much reason to revisit it if he doesn’t care for it that much."

Me again: I frequently find myself liking books most other people don't and vice-versa. The Jugger's a good example. No it's not a great Parker adventure but it's got a lot of early Sixties atmosphere, a cast of truly despicable characters and a constantly shifting plot.

What we have here is a kind of psychodrama. We have a dumb but crafty Sheriff, a smart but unlucky FBI man, a dumb but uncrafty lady friend of a pathetic dead guy who'd been trying to find an imaginary sum of money hidden by Joe Sheer.

It goes like this. Parker and Sheer worked together sometimes and then Sheer got old and all he did was serve as a way station for Parker. If you wanted to talk to the big man you had to call Sheer who'd screen you. But when Parter got a nervous communication from Sheer he got concerned that maybe the old man was coming apart and would blow Parker's cover. He had to go to the small Midwestern city and make sure that didn't happen.

But when he got there Sheer was dead. And the (imaginary) enormous amount of stolen money was nowhere to be found--yes there;s money but it's modest compared to what others think. So Parker proceeds to deal with both problems. Under the name of Willis.

The Psychodrama: The Sheriff is a dope but a brutal one and Parker has to string him along in order to learn what he needs to. Watching Parter mislead him is a game worth watching. The Sheriff is a human pit bull. He's capable of killing Parker at any moment. But then Parker is more than willing to strike first. On the other hand the FBI man is slick and political. Mitt Romney could play him. Quoting Norman Mailer on a writer he didn't like: "He's as full of shit as a Thanksgiving turkey." But he suspects that this guy Willis is really a big catch under another name. He's already signing a book contract and learning to wave in parades.

So The Jugger ain't perfect and ain't gonna win none of them NYC awards but I don't care. I just enjoyed this particular take on Parker's world. I read it in two dazzled sittings.

Bright Lights, Big City: John D. MacDonald’s Las Vegas JARED SHURIN

Bright Lights, Big City: John D. MacDonald’s Las Vegas
Ed here:I've always liked this review by Jared Shurin onTor.Com 

Although author of over one hundred books, it was rare for John D. MacDonald to leave the fertile stomping ground of his native Florida. Like his characters, he clearly felt uncomfortable in the big Northeastern cities or windswept Texan plains. However, in his novels set in Las Vegas, MacDonald harnesses that discomfort to write two works of almost perfect noir. 

The Empty Trap (1957) and The Only Girl in the Game (1960) are both better remembered for their lusty Robert McGinnis cover art than their content. The similarities don’t stop there. In both books, the protagonists are young hotel managers, working in Las Vegas and wrestling with the unpleasant awareness their hotels are owned by the mob.
TThe plots are similar as well. In each, the square-jawed, broad-shouldered, straight-laced hero falls for the wrong girl and tries to fight the mob. In The Empty Trap, this is Sylvia, the young wife of the hotel’s Syndicate owner. In The Only Girl in the Game, the femme is Vicky, a lounge singer and (cough) extra-hours employee of the casino. In both books, the forbidden love between the Square Jaw and the Reluctant Mob-Moll serves to pull the trigger on the action.However, despite their identical trappings, the books explore the noir world in different ways. The Empty Trap is a simple revenge story. It begins with Lloyd Wescott, Square Jaw, plummeting off a cliff. He’s tried to get away from the mob with both cash and girl and, judging by his opening position (falling), the attempt failed.

Lloyd’s story reveals one of the rudimentary principles of the genre: he’s an imperfect protagonist in an imperfect world. Lloyd’s own recognition of this dark truth is the most compelling part of the book. He begins the book knowing “that he was one of the good guys. That made it simple, because then you always knew how it came out.... But something was wrong with this script [he wasn’t saved] in the nick of time. The nick of time went right on by while you screamed and screamed onto a bloody towel.” (33)
(sorry about lack of caps--couldn't figure out what was wrong)

for the rest go here:
http://www.tor.com/blogs/2011/08/brig...-
d-macdonalds-las-vegas

The Night Remembers; A Disgrace To The Badge

Here's what reviewers had to say about Ed Gorman's 1991 mystery. "Subtle, ironic, never flashy (THE NIGHT REMEMBERS introduces Jack Walsh)...the kind of sleuth forever dogged by somber truths and bitter ironies. He grows on you, and so does Gorman." --Booklist "Gorman's sixtyish sleuth Jack Walsh, tough as the job demands but as compassionate as the circumstance permits, is a gem and Gorman surrounds him with an ingenious story and a solid supporting cast." --Robert Wade, San Diego Union "Character and a sense of place (Cedar Rapids) are the strengths of this taut who-really-dunnit." --Publisher's Weekly "THE NIGHT REMEMBERS is some of the best work Gorman has ever done. Walsh deserves a long life and an extensive literary life." --Library Bulletin

NOW ON KINDLE $3.99



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"A western for grown ups written in a lean, hardboiled style."-Publishers Weekly on DEATH GROUND
"Simply one of the best western writers of our time."
-Rocky Mountain News

Now on kindle $2.99

The Western Fictioneers Library is proud to present this powerful new collection of stories from one of the most acclaimed Western authors of all time. Ed Gorman's deeply moving stories of courage and tragedy in the Old West feature compelling writing, vivid characterization, and rawhide-tough authenticity. A DISGRACE TO THE BADGE AND OTHER WESTERN STORIES features the following tales: "A Disgrace to the Badge", "Killer in the Dark", "A Good Start", "A Small and Private War", "Death and Trooper Monroe", "Deathman", and the nostalgic article "On Roy Rogers". Read these stories and you'll see why Ed Gorman is hailed by readers worldwide as one of the very best!

Hard Times-Charles Bronson

Ed here: Anear perfect picture that holds up to many viewings.
Bronson was never as good and this is
Walter Hill in one of his finest writing-directorial moments.


July 5, 2013
Down and Out Cold in the ’30sBy DAVE KEHRCharles Bronson achieved stardom relatively late in life, after surviving a harsh childhood as one of 15 children of Polish-Lithuanian parents in the coal country of Pennsylvania, service as an aerial gunner in World War II and close to 20 years as a hard-working journeyman actor in Hollywood movies and TV shows. (That’s him, for example, as Vincent Price’s evil henchman in the 3-D “House of Wax” from 1953.)It wasn’t until the late ’60s when, as one of several second-tier American stars who had found reliable employment in European genre films, that Bronson began to attract a following. Seeing the soulfulness in his sad eyes and scar-thickened face, Sergio Leone cast him as the soft-spoken, revenge-driven hero of “Once Upon a Time in the West”(1968), a film far more successful in Europe than it was in its heavily cut American release; a starring role in the French thriller “Rider on the Rain”(1970), directed by René Clément, gained him new critical respect in America, though paradoxically in an art-house context.Entering his 50s, and without much time to lose, Bronson exploited his sudden popularity by appearing in a series of undistinguished crime films, directed by assorted British functionaries (Terence Young, Michael Winner, J. Lee Thompson), usually on European locations. (One important exception was Richard Fleischer’s taut 1974 “Mr. Majestyk,”adapted from a novel by Elmore Leonard.)After the runaway success of Winner’s crude “Death Wish,” a Nixonian law-and-order fantasy with Bronson as a New York architect turned vigilante, Bronson seemed to abandon his ambitions as an actor and spent most of his late career walking through routine variations on the “Death Wish” formula (including four sequels), in frank pursuit of the paychecks that would allow him to maintain the large family he had founded with his wife (and frequent co-star) Jill Ireland. A waste of potential, perhaps — but for a man who had entered the coal mines at the age of 10, a choice Charles Bronson was entitled to make.There was one film, though, that gave Bronson his due, that took a full and fair measure of his talent and significance and placed him in a context that summarized and extended his distinctive appeal.

ed here:
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/07/mov...-
packs-a-punch-in-walter-hills-hard-times.html

FORGOTTEN BOOKS - The Pat Hobby Stories

Ed here: Here's Fitzgerald photographed by Cedar Rapids'
own Carl van Vechten

TUESDAY, JULY 22, 2008FORGOTTEN BOOKS - The Pat Hobby StoriesLosers have always interested me more than winners. There's a line from a Leonard Cohen poem "The simple life of heroes/The twisted lives of saints." I'll take the saints (though Cohen isn't talking about folks the Vatican bestows sainthood on that's for sure).

My formative years were the Fifties. The films that influenced me the most were the noirs my father took me to and such fare as The Sweet Smell of Success and A Face in the Crowd. No heroes there. The same for my preferred reading (in additon to the Gold Medals and sf)--Hemingway, James Jones, Irwin Shaw (short stories), Graham Greene and Richard Wright among others. No heroes there either. Same for theater (I was writing terrible plays early on). O'Neill, Miller, Williams. Not a hero in sight.

We call a good deal of crime fiction dark. But is it? Cops replaced cowboys and now we have Cops (or investigators of any kind) with Personal Problems and reviewers think this is some kind of dangerous fiction. Not to me.  (Note: This was written before the new generation really hit its stride, everybody from Tom Piccirilli to Megan Abbott to Marcus Sakey to Wallace Stroby.)

The constraints of commercial fiction are such that you risk losing a sale if your protagoist is an outright loser. The Brits were way ahead of us Yanks. Derek Raymond has spawned two generations of daring writers. The first time I read him I was struck by how much the texture of his prose remided me of one of my five favorite books of all time, Down and Out in Paris and London by George Orwell. I read fifty pages of it the other day. What with globalization the world is once again as Orwell described it in the Thirties.

The literary writer Brian Moore (who started out writing Gold Medals and Dell originals under three different names) made a brief early career out of losers. The Lucky Of Ginger Coffee, for only one example, is about a daydreamer most people love but who is ultimately a selfish man whose daydreams are destroying his wife and children. He can't accept that he's an average guy-- to him that's being a loser. And that turns him into a dark loser indeed.

F. Scott Fitzgerald's work is filled with losers. Handsome, poetic ones, yes, but losers nonetheless. Winter Dreams, as one of his best stories is called, describes the near lifelong love of a man for woman he can never have. He has great business success but still there remains his failure to possess her. The last few pages will give you chills.

Here we have The Pat Hobby Stories. They are set in the Hollywood of the late Thirties and feature a once prominent screeenwriter who is reduced to virtually begging for work at the various studios that once wined and dined him. The Fitzgerald myth is so tied to the notion of Romantic Loss that we forget that he was also funnier than hell. And causitc.

As Arnold Gingrich said shortly after Fitzgerald's death, "These stories were the last word from his last home, for much of what he felt about Hollywood and about himself permeated these stories."

And damned good stories they are, too. Not major Fitzgerald but cunning and crafty tales of bars, studios, whores of both genders, unhappy winners and drunken losers.

My favorite here is "Pat Hobby and Orson Welles." The luckless Hobby is hanging around the writer's building trying to cadge anything he can get--even a B-western--when someone mentions Orson Welles. And Hobby almost loses it. Everywere he turns he hears about Orson Welles--newspaper, magazines, radio, movies. Orson Welles Orson Welles Orson freaking Welles.

Fitzgerald uses Welles as a symbol of a generational turn. Hobby and other men his age were major players in their time but now their time is gone. One studio head admits (reluctantly) to Hobby that he doesn't know what the hell all the fuss about Welles is either but dammit the young people on his staff swoon every time his name is mentioned. So this studio head and others push enormous sums of money on Welles. Hobby bitterly wonders why Welles doesn't stay in the East where he belongs---with the snobs. The West, dammit, is for common folk. (Well, except for the mansions and Rodeo Drive.)

This is a book fileld with boozy grief, hilarious bitterness and a fascinating look from the inside as to what writers went through under the old studio management.

As Fitzgerald himself said, "This was not art, this was industry. (Who) you sat with at lunch was more important than what you (wrote) in your office."

A fine little collection.

From Our Friend Fred Blosser

SATURDAY, OCTOBER 27, 2007
Like now. I wonder what fans would nominate as the worst or most disappointing movies based on well-loved detective and mystery novels and series.

My top two choices, coincidentally, are from the same year -- 1986, that golden era of Reagan, Thatcher, and Iran-Contra:

BLUE CITY, directed by Michelle Manning (who?), from the novel by Ross Macdonald. Judd Nelson starred as Macdonald's seething protagonist, Johnny Weather. Seething ... Judd Nelson ... need I say more? I don't remember much by way of details, except that RM's dour Post-World War II setting was updated to the '80s, and Nelson ambled through the opening scene listlessly bouncing a basketball. I kept waiting in anticipation for someone to grind his smirk into the sidewalk. The IMDB says that Walter Hill produced and (with Lukas Heller, another usually reliable guy) wrote the script. And buried somewhere in the cast was the great Scott Wilson. Sad.

EIGHT MILLION WAYS TO DIE. "Miami Vice" was big that year, so they transplanted Lawrence Block's Matt Scudder from New York to LA, the better to swipe Michael Mann's pastel color schemes and Latino vibe. Jeff Bridges did about the best he could as Scudder, I suppose, but if you're going to pluck Scudder out of Gotham, why not just give the character another name? Somewhere I read (I think in EASY RIDERS, RAGING BULLS) that Hal Ashby was allegedly stoned throughout the whole shoot, letting the actors "improvise" their dialogue. This meant that in most of the scenes, the dialogue mostly consisted of Bridges and the other actors yelling "F*ck you!" at each other over and over again. (I've read that the BURGLAR movie with Whoopie Goldberg was even worse, but I never had the heart to see it.)

Number three in the list, NO GOOD DEED from 2002, probably qualifies more as a disappointment than as an out and out bad movie. At least, it doesn't plumb the stygian depths of putridity that BLUE CITY and EIGHT MILLION WAYS TO DIE did. Still, if you have a story based on Hammett ("The House on Turk Street"), Bob Rafelson as the director, and Sam Jackson, Stellen Skarsgard, Mila Jovovich, Joss Ackland, and Grace Zabriskie in the cast, you might expect something better than what Rafelson delivered. For some reason, maybe to meet his quota of cliches, the screenwriter felt compelled to give Jackson's character a "gimmick" (in the Hammett story, he was the comfortably anonymous Continental Op). And so he's a failed jazz musician who toots on a saxophone.

It would be interesting if others can make a case for merits in these three films that I failed to see ..........

Fred B.

The Greatest Literary Take-Downs--Salon

The greatest literary takedowns of all timeAttacks on literature's sacred cows are nothing new. Here are some of the most memorableBY LAURA MILLER
It has been a season of literary takedowns, but then it usually is. You can always get a rise out of the otherwise lethargic reading public by launching an offensive against one of its icons. In the past two months alone, we have had Kathryn Schulz disliking “The Great Gatsby” in New York magazine, Christian Lorentzen’s salvo against Alice Munro in the London Review of Books, and Joseph Epstein in the Atlantic Monthly, asking, “Is Franz Kafka Overrated?”The great thing about such essays from an editor’s perspective is that they make one portion of the readership angry enough to quarrel with the critic in the comments thread and beyond. Meanwhile, another portion is enthusiastic to an almost equal degree at having their privately held reservations finally voiced in a public forum. Still other readers can, like high school students, be counted upon to cluster around any promise of a fight. Emotions run high, which is the journalist’s brass ring and pretty hard to come by in discussions of literary topics.For this reason, the literary takedown has a long and storied history. Perhaps the most celebrated of them all is Mark Twain’s hilarious “Fenimore Cooper’s Literary Offenses,” a flamboyant drubbing of the early American author of wilderness adventure novels. Surveying “The Deerslayer,” Twain observes that “in the restricted space of two-thirds of a page, Cooper has scored 114 offenses against literary art out of a possible 115. It breaks the record,” and then goes on to list the “nineteen rules governing literary art in the domain of romantic fiction,” 18 of which Cooper has violated.“When you strike at a king, you must kill him,” Ralph Waldo Emerson warned Oliver Wendell Holmes when Holmes, then a college student, sent him a paper in which he railed against Plato for “loose and unscientific” thinking. A corollary to Emerson’s advice: If you’ve got to strike somebody, don’t pick on the serving lad; that only makes you look like a bully. A good literary takedown selects its target with care. If Cooper was not quite a king, he did enjoy a good amount of popularity and critical respect, the latter of which Twain demonstrates by opening his attack with three examples of praise Cooper had received from professors and another novelist (Wilkie Collins).To kill him, Twain offers a highly detailed dissection of the physical impossibilities represented in one of Cooper’s action scenes and several other instances in which the novelist was “splendidly inaccurate.” But Twain was not merely pedantic on practical matters related to sharpshooting and riverine navigation. He was also, as ever, funny — declaring, of Cooper’s uneven dialogue, “when a personage talks like an illustrated, gilt-edged, tree-calf, hand-tooled, seven-dollar Friendship’s Offering in the beginning of a paragraph, he shall not talk like a negro minstrel in the end of it.”Exasperation, rather than flaming rage, is the emotion that drives the best takedowns. A certain distance also helps. A pan of a single novel that has otherwise been admiringly reviewed and is by an author currently in his or her prime, doesn’t really count. First, living authors are never as revered as the dead kind, so the critic lacks the moral high ground obtained by attacking a sacred cow. Furthermore, many a great writer has produced a mediocre book, and a takedown ought to encompass an entire career, even if it chooses to focus, as Twain did, on one exemplary title. Lastly, since so many critics are novelists themselves, an assault on the reputation of a living competitor, especially one who’s near the attacker in rage, will usually be read as motivated by feelings of professional resentment and rivalry.Some takedowns, written by young critics about a living author relatively late in his or her career, amount to generational shots across the bow. That’s what Lorentzen seems to have been attempting in complaining that, in contrast to “the consensus around Alice Munro,” he finds her short stories drab, repetitive and excessively “sad.” It’s what David Foster Wallace was clearly up to in 1997, when he reviewed one of John Updike’s disposable late novels in a piece given the headline “John Updike, Champion Literary Phallocrat, Drops One; Is This Finally the End for Magnificent Narcissists?” It was Wallace’s way, à la Harold Bloom’s “The Anxiety of Influence,” of clearing some space for the new kids in town.
for the rest go here:http://www.salon.com/2013/07/03/the_g...
literary_takedowns_of_all_time/