Like all sensitive new-age guys, I had my problems with the thuggery of Mike Hammer, but when Jeff recently gave me a bag of pulp mysteries he'd bought in acquiring Ross Macdonald paperbacks, I read some non-Hammer Spillanes and was surprised at how tightly they were written and how powerful his simple, direct prose was—it was all action verbs and short sentences, which, any writer will tell you, is the key to making pages pop.
…
It's a pretty good list, though, if a little serious. Two books I would have added would have upped the fun factor considerably. First, there's the sadly OOP The Death of David Debrizzi by Paul Micou, which is a joyous yawp of a rant directed at a pompous, prominent impresario dictated from the deathbed of his disgraced…
Duffy apparently takes us beyond the conventional saga of incompetent and bloody-minded command and tells a revolutionary story about a battle I thought had nothing new to offer.
Since, over the last few entries, I've developed a thread of recommending other books, I'll also tout Stephen O'Shea's Back to the Front: An Accidental Historian Walks the…
That's what I get for trusting Auntie Beeb.
But alas, it's now 2006 and according to Davis…
Yes, the Solo went back some time ago. But not before I came very close to purchasing it. The Solo's a wonderful introduction to hi-fi: it does everything you want it to do, it does it well, and it looks good doing it. It's simple and fun. Something like that is always nice to have around. In fact, I wish I had one here, right now, in my office. I'd play M. Ward's bouncy Post War,…
BTW, in Music Is My Mistress, Ellington devoted a chapter to Mills. IIRC, it consisted of the following sentence: "My mother told me that if you can't say something nice about somebody, say nothing."