>>>>Must be an interesting person to know. Years ago I went on a jag of reading his stuff and rather enjoyed a lot of it. Think I started with "Enders Game"
>>>
>>>One of the great SF books of all time, and "Speaker for the Dead" was an astonishing sequel. Card is an amazing writer. A writer who really thinks hard about what he's trying to say.
>>
>>Get into
Wokan Furies yet?
>>
>>By the way, have we ever discussed Ross Thomas? I'm rereading (well, re-hearing actually on CD )
Chinaman's Chance He was really something special. Some of the most vivid characters I've ever met in any fiction. Good to clear the palate if somebody held your mother hostage and made you read Grisham, Ludlum, Clancy ...
>
>Not only have we not discussed him, I was until this moment (well, actually a few moments ago) unaware of him. I will check him out.
>
>BTW, did you ever get hold of the 'Beyond the fringe' video? If so, do you also think Peter Cook is a genius (not to mention the rest of them).
Have the DVD now but haven't watched it yet. Look forward to doing so.
Ross Thomas won the Edgar a couple times, also wrote as Oliver Bleek ( very hard to find that stuff ) and was one of those authors that consistantly showed up on the favorite authors list of Elmore Leonard, Ross McDonald, Joe Gores, Thomas Perry etc but was never a best-seller. His work doesn't lend itself to that,and when you read one you'll know why. It is the same reason he is in my all time favorite list.
Disclaimer : he was also a friend and mentor and my first reader for
Headhunter Jazz. Had I been less pig headed in 1988 and Warner published HHJ he had already written me the jacket blurb of my fantasies. Of course the fact that he liked it was pretty much all the affirmation I really needed and since he and I agreed on it my incentive to get very market oriented with it pretty much evaporated (there isn't a lot of money in writing good books, only popular books, and I never wrote HHJ with that as a goal. i am really in awe of those who can do both) maybe next time I'll do a coffee table books about cats.
(oh, and in the movie Hammett with Frederick March he is not just a screenwriter but one of the players in the poker game )
Mr Thomas died about a dozen years ago. His last book was
Ah, Treachery http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ross_Thomas_(author)http://www.theatlantic.com/issues/96nov/hiss/hiss.htmhttp://www.stopyourekillingme.com/T_Authors/Thomas_Ross.html
Charles Hankey
Though a good deal is too strange to be believed, nothing is too strange to have happened.
- Thomas Hardy
Half the harm that is done in this world is due to people who want to feel important. They don't mean to do harm-- but the harm does not interest them. Or they do not see it, or they justify it because they are absorbed in the endless struggle to think well of themselves.
-- T. S. Eliot
Democracy is two wolves and a sheep voting on what to have for lunch.
Liberty is a well-armed sheep contesting the vote.
- Ben Franklin
Pardon him, Theodotus. He is a barbarian, and thinks that the customs of his tribe and island are the laws of nature.
