DEREK RAYMOND
I was Dora Suarez in another life that didn’t last very long and was very full. But not full enough. Derek Raymond takes everything so personally as do his characters. The detective is vigorous in his distastefulness. He is there to find the most distasteful thing that can happen. And dig in. A man stinking of his occupation like a morgue or manure attendant. A fish monger, but not an economical one, because he is immersed in each and ever fish guts seeking the life and the death of the fish. Like telling fortunes with the bones. Telling them and making them so. The detective is full of the despair of a mad wife and a mentally abused young girl, both dead. The loves of his life one love killing the other. Mad. So all’s left is to hunker down into the stinking mud beneath the human skin as it desiccates steaming up the room with its sweet gut stench. Wearing the body and learning the life of this AIDS ravaged child flashing about searching for the fun injection. A cannibal but metaphysical through the eyes and into the mind eaten and like a drug. The detective is transformed by Dora’s consciousness and is living her life that had just a short time ago ended. Her journals tell him what to think. Her crazy fucked up life. Derek Raymond is himself immersed in the haunted detective and the haunting Dora Suarez. As well he dwells with ghoulish glee in the head of the most terrible man who sliced up Dora and came inside her extreme pain, the pain getting more and more extreme by his teasing. And the monster’s sex life which is to pummel himself to get his painfully bleeding ragged member off, to find the ultimate climax to all the purposeful mayhem, the torture and murder relived as the apex of all climaxes, at least for this completely damaged soul. Derek Raymond describes the most heinous of crimes with the avenging angel equal to the battered souls of the two main characters involved and therefore is there to avenge.

POE & LAUTREMONT
In some ways going from Poe to Lautremont is like going from King (Stephen) to Burroughs (W.S.). Poe was the great commercial writer who could weave a tale with thick atmosphere so you could feel the horror. Lautremont dove right into the horror, tasting it, letting you know all about it. Life inside the viscera, the viscera are the walls that surround you on your visit into the depths of a person’s existence. Like an explorer on a hazardous mission through strange terra, the drama is just there in the surprises popping out, new thought passages through all those guts. It’s a long time since I read the Comte de Lautremont and I am occupying his what, his genre? Or his choices? Tales told without a without, the occupation of an imagined but construed as credible outside, streets and rooms and whatever. It’s all in the innards.

WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS
Burroughs never ceases to amaze with his brilliant skills. What he talks about is a dark and twisted and paranoid history. And he tells about it better than everybody. He doesn’t design a great cathedral of words as Proust has done, or build any elaborate labyrinth as did Joyce. He is more modern than them. He is willing to cut up his words and tear apart any definable structure. It is the words that are sublime and the way they are fixed together to generate an imagistic power.

FITZGERALD & GARCIA MARQUEZ
What could be more impossible then to build a novel which seduces one to read with bated breath to the ending and then disappear from the world before the story ends. F. Scott Fitzgerald could craft a page turner with the best of them. Love is a GIANT question that draws the reader through. But it has to and it is most difficult to be true, a love qua love of a sort. Purest and most heart wrenching. Fitzgerald was a gifted storyteller who left the reader enthralled. And Gabriel Garcia Marquez showed this gift with Love In the Time Of Cholera. A tension reading the beautiful words which must explode at the ending and you rush to get there through the intricate viscera of the story, the tapestry of images strung on. The pain of need getting there soothed by the pangs of beauty while getting there.

PROUST
What a piece of work is Marcel's rememberances. As said above, Proust carefully constructs a cathedral full of support arches whose greatest arc is completed once all has been read. The sensitive soul, bed ridden early in life, is able to construct a model for his adulthood because of the sensitivity, the obssessiveness which simplifies the shortened life in terms of the number of things of importance and to be noticed and to be thus included in the autobiographical construction. It is a tale of a charming man alone in his milieu seeking a connection but finding his loneliness, his ego/existence is ultimately preemptive to a communion of souls. A love story and an epiphanic explosion of a tangible, sense generated vision of a man at the end with all of his life again to be savored like the flavor of madeleine. Short and sweet.

PELECANOS
The gumshoe tradition of following the biography of a man, a detective, through his history with Ross MacDonald and Laurence Block and Andrew Vasche and etc., as the fictional detective ages and gets wise and changes and, as in the case of Vasche especially, the writer hones his skills and the writer gets wisdom is shattered by Pelecanos by a sort of Rashoman phenomenon but with a focus in each character at peak times in their lives meaning the events are occurring in each narrative at different decades. The true gumshoe of this chain of friends and acquaintances stars in three of the narratives so he fits right in to the tradition. But other texts find the private eye as a passing character, not always useful . A foil to gain perspective on the main character in that particular narrative. Although there is the occasional out-of-state travel, into the small towns of Virginia or North Carolina or Pennsylvania, most of the setting stays in the Washington city limits or suburban Silver Springs and is the environs for a Greek family and those characters important to the family’s life. The great early novel Shoedog, which was set in an urban DC most of the time, made little or no contact with the Greek family, but Pelecanos brings the shoedog into a recent novel again to find that tie that binds the literature together, creating a narrative of a piece which not only has the various pieces react with each other but those pieces are able to stand alone with perhaps a less resonant reaction to some characters but yet those characters do present themselves in the text which makes them secondary with a full bodied and unique and interesting enrichment to the world of the novel. And of course those several moments, the centers of several novels, the plots, the drive, are bloody and traumatic with a hot, bullet laden or at the various least bloody climax smashing itself against the wall the rest of the novel erected . With a skill not as altogether together as Ross MacDonald, but still fine, one can quibble about the formulaic nature of these builds and climaxes a little more than one would with Ross, but it’s still a heck of a lot of fun to read, and the world created has a tarnished reality which gives it grit one can savor and get embedded.

CHESTER HIMES
A lesson in commerciality wherein the writing for a buck (or a franc) produced some of if not all of the coolest police procedurals ever written. The Harlem of Himes is a fantasy place with a real life cement quality grit. The humor is hard and clever and charming all at the same time. The grotesqueness of Coffin Ed is a dark sarcophogus of a character who views life as if through the lid of a coffin. As the craziness of the street parades by him, and the naive young white officers flounder, he is amused, and ruthless when any of the nonsense ended up stepping on his flat foot. What is it about the concise fiction of the detective novel that draws me in? It is two-fold. The story is designed as a puzzle in which clues are given up for the ending wherein everything falls together, and the mystery and the intentionality of the conclusion motivates to sustain reading as much as possible to get to the end. But just as, or more correctly more then this draw is the writing, the descriptiveness with its vivid noir sense of atmosphere and character. It is that which makes it great writing, and the former which hangs it off the pulp, commercial bandwagon in denial of the art. Of course such a question of literary canons seems the most superflous in reltionship to money. The stuff sells and it is great art.

PYNCHON
On the other side of driving narrative is the wash of sea changes in the most ambitious work of Thomas Pynchon. Gravity's Rainbow and Mason & Dixon are both plotted in the picaresque style in which it is the trail blazed through the exploration of the unknown in all its fearsomeness and surprises which is the narrative. There is a question to be answered, a plot to be resolved, which is drawn through the odd, the weird, the bizarre, the happenstance of encounters along the way. And those encounters with people, animals or inanimate objects either move the story further along its pathway or take a quick exit, a rest stop of a most psychedilic nature, before resuming the journey. Even those encounters along the plotted way seem off the beaten, but of course Pynchon has seldom if ever found himself on the beaten track. Maybe Vineland in relationship to some of Boyle's earlier works, but of course Vineland was fun and excellent and simple and beautiful and the easiest, alongside the Crying Of Lot 49, to read. Those are more books by design while Gravity and Mason are relections along a journey through time and place to an inevitable but somehow always fairly distant destination.

T. CORAGHESSAN BOYLE
The intimacy of his earlier works seems lost now a days. His focus is averted by his success. He has found gimmicks to go by. He is still a good writer, still enjoyable, but the fullness of breadth which occurred in earlier works such as Budding Prospects and World's End seem to have narrowed to peculiar foci on his more recent work. It could be seen creeping up in and was completely persuaded by the fiction/reality of place created by Road To Wellville. It's success both brought the author riches which served to alienate him from the run of the mill society, the everyman tautology or cosmology which created the wonder and insight of his earlier books and showed a technique for success which alienated him from an earthy core in which his pool of influence sat and stirred and sang. Even East Is East seems an earlier model for it, fashioning the ivory tower world of creative writing in the context of academia too precious to convince us of its universality. Again it has to be said Boyle is a good read. His fluid writing and clever constructions give me a kick every time I pick up his newest book. There is wit in his characters, not so much with what they say, but in their psychology in relationship to the plot.

HARUKI MURAKAMI & RYU MURAKAMI
It is really unfair to place these two fine Japanese novelists side by side. But it is in fact their side by side configuration of names which brought me to the attention of Ryu. My brother turned me on to A Wild Sheep Chase. I gloriously basked in the magic and subtle wryness of the book. Haruki is a colorful visualist, imagisitic and vivid and an equal to Garcia Marquez. His work is at once more mundane as well as more magical than the Columbian author if not as richly crafted. Marquez lets us graze in the monkey jungle whereas Haruki sets up the hard walls of a kitchen home to sit at table to eat a traditional or habitual meal that somehow suddenly does not taste at all the same. In terms of plot, Haruki seems to be a surrealist, but looking at the juxtaposition there's carefulness, a well crafted irony, which finds a model in Kafka. Like K., Haruki's hero is dispossessed in one way or another. There is a disengagement from society while somehow the anchor is still well attached to it. The stuff going on is crazy, but it is a careful craziness revealed to hardly anyone so as not to call attention to himself. Ryu on the other hand or side of the world dwells in the depths of society, the poor, the repeatedly outraged, the world of the pharmaceutically inhanced. The world comes at the reader like a sledgehammer or good shot of dirty street shit. Characters lose their souls only to buy them back at a nearby black market street vendor. Ryu's plots are more reasonbly imagined, following the course of hard knocks towards the desperate though satisfying conclusion. How are they similar? A similar generation and Tokyo their main city and they sit beside eachother, strange bedfellows, at my neighborhood used bookstore.