Scouting for
more and more and other writers of police procedural novels led me to James
Ellroy … after reading about him, I understood that he is more of a hard-hitting
crime fiction author … not like Ian Rankin, Peter Robinson, or Henning Mankell
who had a ‘Detective Inspector’ and wrote a series of chronological police
procedural novels with that Inspector in the lead … as I read on, I decided to
try The
LA Quartet, four novels with The Black Dahlia being the first … there
is a police investigation involving fictional police detectives into the brutal
real-life murder of Elizabeth Short … his style in these novels is described as
moving towards “postmodern historiographic
metafiction” from his earlier style of “classic
modernist noir fiction” … mmmm … I need to find out more about these terms …
anyway, a very basic layman understanding is there is some real-life people and
incidents fused with fictional characters and maybe even locations involved, in
the former … fact and fiction … Carl Muller, the Sri Lankan writer,
called this style that he used in his novels (some of them riotously funny …) as “faction” … very witty … just like his novels … So, The Black Dahlia went
into the cart …
After I had
finished collecting Peter Robinson’s ‘Inspector Banks’ series of police
procedural novels, I felt there was some unfinished business … Robinson had
also written three standalone novels and short stories … these short stories (many
with Inspector Banks …) are collected in two volumes … actually I had been
eyeing the short story collections for some time … I had bought one of them, The
Price of Love, in August last year, but Not Safe After Dark was
proving elusive … I found two of these standalone novels and Not
Safe After Dark with a used books sellers on amazon … now, there was
some satisfaction …
And I added
three more to my collection of books by Stephen Fry … yeah, another used books
seller on amazon … I loved him in Jeeves and Wooster and in the comic
double act A Bit of Fry and Laurie, both with Hugh Laurie … Fry was superb
as Jeeves … get a chance, watch it … whereas Moab is my Washpot and The
Fry Chronicles are autobiographical narratives, The Liar is his first
novel … I have read great things about these books, but I haven’t started any
of them yet … Moab is my Washpot was highly recommended by a sensible friend …
but I think I will start with The Liar …
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