about: barton hewett
I love crime fiction and have been reading it since my parents gave me a complete set of Sherlock Holmes stories many, many years ago. I read crime fiction extensively while taking a degree in English at the University of Toronto. It is perhaps not a coincidence
that my highest mark ever in a English Lit class was in "Detective Fiction"! In particular, I read Chandler, Hammet, John D. MacDonald, Amos Walker and Robert B Parker. My real eye-opening came when I read my first Ellroy, The Black Dahlia, and from that point on what was a occassional habit became a major addiction. Currently I am reading Jack O'Connell, Stuart MacBride, Denise Mina, James Sallis, and Don Winslow. Many of the authors who work this field are fine writers and well worth reading, mostly. So what visitors to this site are going to get are reviews of what I am reading. I want to let you know about really great books and authors I discover and, occasionally I may write about a disappointing work that I suffered through, or a disappointing work not without some merit.
quote: James Ellroy
America was never innocent. We popped our cherry on the boat over and looked back with no regrets. You can't ascribe our fall from grace to any single event or set of circumstances. You can't lose what you lacked at conception.
American Tabloid
At any rate, I hope some of you will enjoy this and that it will provide some interest for crime fiction fans out there. It is my hope it will grow in to a place where people visit often for their dose of crime news. I will also have a Canadian Crime Fiction section to showcase the talents of the many Canadian crime writers.
favourites:
James Ellroy is really one of the greats. His LA Quartet, Black Dahlia, Big Nowhere, LA Confidential, and White Jazz is one of the best series ever - a great and grand fever dream that takes the crime novel as a cultural artifact and explodes it in a blaze of extremism. His novel American Tabloid is one of the finest written by an American writer.
John D. MacDonald's Travis McGee series is a great continuation of what Chandler and Hammet started, great stories, fine writing and just enough social criticism to give them that additional fine edge: "She worked in one of those Park Avenue buildings which tourists feel obligated to photograph. It's a nice building to visit, but they would not want to live there," from: Nightmare in Pink.
Woody Haut is a London-based journalist and author of Pulp Culture: Hardboiled Fiction and the Cold War and Neon Noir: Contemorary American Crime Fiction, two excellent investigations on the relevance of crime fiction as well a compendium of great writers and novels.
news:
My review of Street Kings
is up; as is a review of the decidedly non-criminal but quite good The Ruins.
crime links:
I will be posting links as I find them. If you have a particular crime/mystery site you like, please email me and I will list and link the best ones!
Upcoming Reviews
I am in the process of reading Jack O'Connell's excellent (so far) Box Nine. Next up is Martyn Waites' Bone Machine and local author Kay Stewart and Chris Bullock's A Deadly Little List. When I get around to it, I may write an essay on the
work of Don Winslow.
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