BOOK AND PODCAST REVIEWS - FICTION

The Black Dahlia (1987) (L.A. Quartet #1) James Ellroy   Devil in A Blue Dress (1990) (Easy Rawlins #1) Walter Mosley   Out of Sight (1996) (Jack Foley #1) Elmore Leonard    There is a great book and a not-so-great book in Ellroy's The Black Dahlia . In fact, it seems like two successive books - the first is an atmospheric but realistic police procedural bringing to life the Los Angeles of the late 1940s and the second is a piece of 'grand guignol' in which sexual obsession and the noir morals of James M. Cain's characters surge their way through a plot out of Raymond Chandler with a dash of Hammett's political cynicism.  We will come across the legacy of Chandler again in Mosley's Devil in a Blue Dress . It certainly cannot be said that the two 'books' merge perfectly seamlessly. The use of period slang at the start can confuse rather than enlighten so that we have to contend with some linguistic confusion as well as the plot confusion essentia

** spoiler alert ** No Country for Old Men is a great book at two levels - style and content. You have to engage with the laconic vernacular of the US Southwestern border country and observe how McCarthy uses it to show how a few words in the right context can get you far deeper into the emotions (or lack of them) of the main protagonists than any long-winded description of feelings. In forty years McCarthy has honed his art far from the excessive literariness of The Orchard Keeper to create a linguistic realism that is great literature. He manages the rare feat of showing how a basic decency, a sentimental decency, triumphs morally over cunning and intellect. He reminds us that 'sentiment', that is feeling one's values as givens without too much analysis, is not to be despised by those whose default mode is knowing irony. There is nothing post-modern about this book. As for the content, this is a deeply political book, without once mentioning politics as most re

This is the first in a series that looks at the first novels of authors who would go on to publish usually more accomplished work. Sometimes the reviews might seem overly critical but it is important to treat each work without hindsight and see how a writer learns from early mistakes and hones his or her craft. For context, the square brackets after the title give the age of the author at publication although a book might have been germinating from a much earlier age. Such works should not be neglected even when it is clear that an author may cringe later at their own early efforts (even in a few cases try to suppress it). These put 'genius' into perspective as a hard learned craft (even if some authors manage to come out with masterpieces at their first attempt), remind us that persistence can pay if the right publisher is there to support the writer and that themes found in later work might sometimes be uncovered early - and so give insights into an author's psychological