New book recommendation: I Am the Messenger.

Alan Rickman reads Sonnet 130

Gah.

collapses

revives a bit to ask question

Anyone have recommendations for good spy novels? I've just given up on Daniel Silva -- I liked the first bunch of books in the Gabriel Allon series, but the last few have been way over-the-top in the political anvils, and the "lesson" of this latest one seemed to be "Anyone who doesn't think that Muslim radicals are going to take over Europe in the next few decades is hopelessly naive." And, well, no. I've been wanting to read the James Bond books. Anything else you'd recommend?

And on a similar note, I'm in the middle of The Big Sleep and really liking it. Where should I start for more mysteries from that period?

Where should I start for more mysteries from that period?

There are a lot of Red Harvest fans around here.

Spy novels: I'm sure ita has a long list. Depends on whether you want to go towards the literary end with LeCarre or Graham Greene or the pulpier Bond end. I think the Frederic Forsyth books are very good: The Odessa File, Day of the Jackal.

Anything by Chandler is good. The Big Sleep is my favorite of his, but The Little Sister and The Long Goodbye are both also great. Jim Thompson's The Killer Inside Me is fantastic. From an earlier generation, I love all of Dashiell Hammett's novels, which are all short enough to practically be novellas (and his whole list of novels is Red Harvest, The Dain Curse, The Maltese Falcon, The Glass Key, and The Thin Man, right? The other works I've read by the guy are all short stories).

The Continental Op is bound as a single work these days. It's fairly obvious a set of discrete stories, though. And yes, that's it for Hammett.

To a large degree deciding what you like about The Big Sleep is what will help with recommendations. I've been having a discussion about noir plots and writers, and realized that we group together a number of writers who are quite unalike. People who like Chandler aren't actually all that likely to enjoy Hammett, if it's Chandler's use of rhetoric they like.

(For the pure crack hit of a locked-room mystery, in lugubrious 1930s style, I recommend Cornell Woolrich, the author of the original Rear Window. )

I don't think I've ever read a spy novel set after about 1980 (nor indeed necessarily published after that date), so I'd be bad at recommendations on that account. Although, really, all those retro-WWII novels are at least unlikely to be politically obnoxious, right? (Although I am clearly an outlier in spy novel taste, because I loathed The Spy Who Came In From The Cold. )

People who like Chandler aren't actually all that likely to enjoy Hammett, if it's Chandler's use of rhetoric they like.

Yes, this. I've read all of Chandler a couple of times and love him to death, but (please forgive me, Corwood) I've staggered through the first two chapters of Red Harvest three or four times in the past three years and found myself paralyzed with not caring very much.

Charles Willeford is bleak and hard and cold and heartless and all his novels live in the borderland between noir and lurid-covered trash (though most of them were published on the trash side of the border), and is consequently a great deal of dark ugly fun.

For a fairly new spy novel you might like Bodyguard of Lies by Bob Doherty - I found it hard to get through the first parts but it picked up after a while.

Wasn't Cornell Woolrich credited with the naming of noir after he wrote a series of books with "black" in the title?

And for classic locked-room mysteries, there's John Dickson Carr (who also wrote as Carter Dickson and Carr Dickson) - he wrote a huge number of books, many of which I didn't like, although at his best he creates a very creepy atmosphere.

edited to close the tag

"The Long Goodbye" is my favorite, and yeah, although I respect Hammett's place in the field, I think I'm a Chandler partisan. Which is kind of messed up for a blonde chick.

Wasn't Cornell Woolrich credited with the naming of noir after he wrote a series of books with "black" in the title?

I don't know. I do have an omnibus of his stuff (not a complete works), and the only anywhere near close title is Waltz into Darkness. (Which is a period novel, ironically; it's an identity switcheroo of the 19th C.)

The conventional wisdom I've always heard has been retronymic: French cinephiles observed the film patterns and described the trend just as it was ending, in the mid-50s; once film noir entered the critical parlance, the general term roman noir and its population of novelists began to be described.

(Of the films, Black Angel is based on a Woolrich novel, and is the only "Black [X]" film title in the noir encyclopedia. There are a bunch of "Dark [X]" and "Night [X]" titles, however, including Dark City (1950), Dark Victory, The Dark Corner, The Dark Mirror, The Dark Passage, Night and the City, Nightfall, and so on.)

please forgive me, Corwood

Oh, of course. I prefer Chandler to Hammett, too, at least in literature. Gimme jaded existential mysteries over bad-tempered tough guys any old day of the week.