Gritty realism

I always liked Mickey Spillane's Mike Hammer books. He started to laugh at me when I pulled the trigger of the .32 and shot him in the thigh. He said, "My God!" under his breath and grabbed his leg. I raised the muzzle of the gun until he was looking right into the little round hole that was his ticket to hell. "Dare me some more, Rainey." I always thought Bogart would have been the perfect Mike Hammer. Visit me http://www.radiodenver.org/

Urban landscapes I'm not so sure, but Jim Thompson is one of the true greats of the hard boiled crime genre. One review in the New Republic contained the line: "Read Jim Thompson and take a tour of hell." I've read almost all of his novels, and though he obviously wrote some of them for the cash in the hopes a movie contract, many of them are classics. Some authors go overboard with the gritty bit. The result seems to be more along the lines of disgusting rather than gritty.

"Addicts, like corpses dug up from the grave, hung stinking and unwashed over broken fences... Couples having violent domestics were interrupted by the screams of prostitutes." Is the next line: "Finally the doors opened and we were in the Kentish Town forum. Three hours later, Mark E. Smith emerged on to the stage."

Dashiell Hammett/Raymond Chandler/Ellroy James/James Leonard should I go on? The Americans can do it, we can't. It's their mode of speech. It's natural to them.

I haven't read many books with incredibly gritty realism, but I think Stephen King is the best in my opinion. That's for books. But the best of all would have to be Frank Miller, the creater of the Sin City graphic novels. The city's as gritty as you can get.

LOL, Buk, is that really the next line? "You don't need the light of the Lord to read the handwriting on the wall." Copies of Warsaw Tales available through www.new-ink.org