Favorite authors

Mystery

• Arthur Conan Doyle
  My first taste, if I recall, of the adult mystery story (as distinguished from juvenile books). I blew through my parents' one-volume "Complete Sherlock Holmes" in entirely too short a time, culminating in a pervasive blue funk, on account of there being no more Holmes tales to be read. Later pastiches (such as "The Seven Percent Solution") helped soothe the ache, but were not the genuine article. I can feel the same difference in the generally excellent Granada Television productions of the Holmes tales (starring the late Jeremy Brett): the dramatizations of the Doyle stories are simply better crafted than the later efforts written by lesser mortals.
• Raymond Chandler
  There's a lot more to Chandler than his writing, which itself is top-notch and has been the subject of a number of films (his The Big Sleep in particular has been filmed several times). What short snippets I've found by him on the art of writing are fascinating as well. This includes his "formula" that, whenever he felt the pace of a story was flagging, he'd have someone come through the door with a gun in hand. There are places in his writing where I can see this approach at work. Also noteworthy is his mastery of the art of taking and reusing episodes from different stories and grafting them seamlessly into a new tale.
• Mickey Spillane
  His Mike Hammer defines "hard-boiled," kind of like Chandler's Philip Marlowe, except with the contrast turned up real high. When I picked up Russian translations of his The Twisted Thing and The Big Kill, I became acutely aware of how culturally American Spillane's fiction is: the translations were a very lukewarm rendering of these classic Hammer tales.
• Dashiell Hammett
  Classic stuff, especially The Maltese Falcon, and The Thin Man.
• Robert B. Parker
  For a while, it looked as if Parker had started going through the motions with his Spenser books (Stardust, for example, does not hold a candle to Searching for Rachel Wallace, in my opinion), but the more recent offerings have turned back around, in my opinion. At any rate, his "completion" of Raymond Chandler's Poodle Springs was done very well.

  I also find it refreshing to see Parker "branching out" more with non-Spenser books. The first two Jesse Stone books were good reads, and as Parker has worked the Healy and Belson characters into these two books, this leads me to wonder: when will Stone meet Spencer, what will they do, and what will be the outcome? I've also read the first Sunny Randall book, and although this woman PI strongly resembles Spencer in temperament and lifestyle, the story is still compelling.

• John D. MacDonald
  Travis McGee. 'Nuf said. Rumor had it that there was one last Travis McGee novel written, to be published after JDMacD's death. MacD's been dead a long time, and I don't recall having heard of any posthumous McGee novel; I despair of such a tome ever being published (and just - with The Lonely Silver Rain - when things were getting interesting!).
• Sue Grafton
  Classy detective fiction, with a woman doing the detecting. All titles play off the alphabet ("A" is for Alibi, etc.),which leads to my one concern: what does she do after publishing "Z" is for ...?

Science fiction

• Robert Heinlein
  Seminal rendering of classic themes. I particularly enjoyed The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, Starship Troopers, Glory Road, and Stranger in a Strange Land. I admit I never fail to be amazed by people who claim to know what Heinlein was "saying" in his fiction, based on having read (for example) Starship Troopers. If you really want to gain an idea of what RAH thought, read Expanded Universe. If you want an even closer look inside RAH's head, read Take Back Your Government!, published posthumously by his wife Virginia in 1992.

  As far as Heinlein's later work is concerned, I personally consider books such as Number of the Beast) to be read-once fiction; your mileage may (and probably will) vary. All-in-all, Heinlein is the Master.

• Jerry Pournelle
  Good solid science fiction, written both alone and with others (notably Larry Niven). If you read just one of these books, get hold of The Mote in God's Eye. Then keep reading his other work to see how he follows Heinlein's "method" of taking an old story (but I mean an old story), "filing off the serial number," and making it his own, as with Go Tell The Spartans.
• Philip K. Dick
  The movies Blade Runner, Total Recall, and Screamers are all based on Dick stories. Personally, I felt his Cold War phobia was a bit extreme and misplaced, but what the hey. I think his Variable Man is a really top-notch short story, maybe the best short story I've ever read.
• David Weber
  A naval hero with the initials H.H. has had his serial numbers filed off by this writer and has been recast as Honor Harrington, in a series of stories that pit Harrington against every kind of enemy. This series has it all: Political intrigue at home, petty (and not so petty) goings-on behind her back, not to mention military situations that would make James T. Kirk and Starfleet yell "Mama!"
• Rick Cook
  Rick has written a series of books that, on the surface, resemble fantasy stories with witches, wizards, dragons, et al., a genre I generally avoid. What appeals to me is how Cook weaves in computer programming, hacking, consulting, and marketing to make a really entertaining story (his latest has a dragon wandering around Las Vegas during COMDEX week, and nobody really notices).

...Everything Else

• James Ellroy
  My first taste of this author was American Tabloid, which I read a few pages of and then set aside, without paying much attention to the book or the author. I wasn't quite sure what to make of a scandalous scenario involving Howard Hughes, Jimmy Hoffa, and J. Edgar Hoover, among others. It seemed at first to be a gimmick, a formula that was too easy to abuse, kind of like when a stand-up comic uses the "F" word to get cheap laughs, and there were more pressing matters to attend to.

  Some time later, at Heathrow preparing to fly home, I selected L.A. Confidential to while away the endless transatlantic hours, more on the strength of having heard of the movie than on knowing the author by name.

  Inexplicably, despite the fact that seemingly every character in the book is afflicted - be it in actions, motivations, proclivities, or some esoteric combination thereof - I could not stop turning pages. In terms I cannot yet clearly express, it was a great book; by far better than the movie (and the movie was actually pretty good).

  When next I visited a bookstore, I realized that, first, I had no idea of the author's name. (I felt silly asking the youth behind the cash register for pointers at more books "written by whoever wrote L.A. Confidential," but one does what one must.) Second, it was not until I skimmed the first page or two of something called American Tabloid, that I realized I already had the book lying around the house. Life is funny like that, sometimes.

  Several books and short stories later, I still get a small case of the shakes when I put down an Ellroy work. But they're the good kind of shakes; at least I keep telling myself that. Here's an example of a couple of Ellroy sentences that rabbit-punched me at the beginning of Clandestine:

  Nostalgia victimizes the unknowing by instilling in them 
  a desire for a simplicity and innocence they can never achieve. 
  The fifties weren't a more innocent time. The dark salients
  that govern life today were there then, only they were 
  harder to find.

• Tom Clancy
  One of few authors I buy in hardback, because he has a way of moving me emotionally and engaging my interest totally. (And the books are tons better than the movies!) I tried (I really did) to pace myself through his latest, Rainbow Six, trying to read no more than 50 pages per day, but failed miserably after the third day. Curiously, after a lifetime of popular fiction (both written and on one type of screen or other) where the "bad" guys are a private corporation intent on world-changing mayhem, Clancy's tale still manages to sound believable.
• Ayn Rand
  I went through the whole Objectivist/libertarian thing back in school. The "Objectivists" seemed always in the mood to condemn anyone who wouldn't toe their line, while the libertarians were too busy goading the "Objectivists" by redrawing the line hourly and, between tokes, making jokes about The Hated Oppressors (which seemed mostly to include everyone not in the room). This left me free to read and, most of all, to think (which was, I seem to recall, the essence of Rand's philosophy).
• Damon Runyon
  I dare you to read Little Miss Marker and not cry. His other "guys and dolls" stories are also high quality. Perhaps the best advice of its sort ever given was related by Runyon in The Idyll of Miss Sarah Brown, and it looks like this:

  "Son," the old guy eays, "no matter how far you travel, or how 
  smart you get, always remember this: Some day, somewhere," he says, 
  "a guy is going to come to you and show you a nice brand-new 
  deck of cards on which the seal is never broken, and this guy
  is going to offer to bet you that the jack of spades will jump
  out of this deck and squirt cider in your ear. But, son," the old
  guy says, "do not bet him, for as sure as you do you are going
  to get an ear full of cider."

• Mark Twain
  Lots of good, strong stuff besides Tom Sawyer and Huckberry Finn. I particularly was impressed with his Joan of Arc. His observation to the effect that "the only difference between truth and fiction is that fiction must make sense" is roundly refuted by the X-Files, which I suspect accounts for the popularity of the latter.
• Vladimir Nabokov
  I got hooked on this writer in college (thank you, Dr. Radley!). I think the first line from his autobiography Speak, Memory is one of the finest lines in literature:

  The cradle rocks above an abyss, and common sense tells us 
  that our existence is but a brief crack of light between 
  two eternities of darkness.

• Antoine de Saint Exupéry
  I used to curse this man's name in high school French class for having given us The Little Prince. After reading his Wind, Sand and Stars, my opinion changed 180 degrees. Most probably, I grew up (though it took me quite a bit longer to learn to correctly spell his name :^).
• Robert W. Service
  Famous for his ballads of the North (The Shooting of Dan McGrew, etc.), Service also wrote much poetry based on his experience as an ambulance driver in France during the First World War. I find it interesting that I can dip into this man's work and repeatedly keep finding new nuggets to enjoy.
• Rudyard Kipling
  Apparently, it's really trendy to not like Kipling nowadays (a bookstore clerk in Santa Cruz, California lectured me about this in 1993). And yet, there are lots of really great things in his work, which can be enjoyed again and again. His Gods of the Copybook Headings is, in my opinion, eerily prophetic.

(If the above date is a hundred years or so off, your browser's Java interpreter isn't current. If the date is missing completely, your Java capability is turned off or doesn't exist.)

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