Michael Craven
Författare till The Detective & The Pipe Girl: A Mystery
Serier
Verk av Michael Craven
Taggad
Allmänna fakta
- Kön
- male
Medlemmar
Recensioner
Listor
Priser
Statistik
- Verk
- 3
- Medlemmar
- 103
- Popularitet
- #185,855
- Betyg
- 3.5
- Recensioner
- 7
- ISBN
- 7
The way this is written I was thinking that all "P.I.s" were going to be called "Dicks," and all the baddies "wise guys." Spare me. I wasn't far off the mark, but it wasn't that bad. The author was a bit too obsessed with using the word "slide," and "irony" and "ironic" throughout primarily when criticizing and mocking "hipsters," but I ended up liking the greater writing style.
Examples of the above:
"Mountcastle got up, turned, and began to slide lightly out of my office."
And:
"From Mar Vista, you pop onto Venice and slide into Hollywood. Slide, my friends. Slide."
Then the other:
Hipster Heaven. Don't even fucking walk in without the proper amount of irony. They should sell pencil-thin mustaches and pencil-thin cardigan sweaters at the door."
And:
"Yes, it has become trendy and full of hipsters and there's too much irony, for sure, but it's still good."
Or just:
"Hipsterville."
I never did get all of the mustache musings, his were all "pencil-thin." Whenever I think of "pencil-thin mustaches" it is either Vincent Price or that Jimmy Buffett song. I thought all hipsters had the little all-in-one scruffy mustache-goatee, never one without the other. You know what I mean. Yeah, you know what I mean. Then again, it has been a while since I have been to L.A. Maybe it's because I lived in Del Rey, the other side of the 405 from Darvelle's Mar Vista.
About the writing, I liked the continuous tangents. Explaining some side issue or thought or opinion to fill in the bigger picture, and then coming right back to the story. I do that so I can relate. I think a lot of people are thrown off track when that happens though. To me, it contributed to the flow and made the entire story a lot more interesting. As I said above, it went fast and never got bogged down.
Part of what killed if for me was that the main suspect wasn't the main suspect, but there was a cloud of suspicion just because. And the whole story leads up to a point... until it doesn't. All of the pieces are put into place during the final rendering; then it all makes sense if that's the story you want to go with. I didn't because that negated one of the best parts of the book. Oh well.
Another downside was that the main character is fixated on drinking bad beer despite his reasoning to the contrary. It's like continually espousing bad coffee, pick something else okay, life is too short. Or, at least be consistent, drink bad beer and drink bad coffee and only date ugly women. Okay. But he tries to put a sophisticated spin on drinking bad beer and that didn't work for me. Sure, drinking "craft beer," like smoking cigars, can be pretentious, but that doesn't negate drinking good beer over beer with no taste and no flavor. There, enough said.… (mer)