Quote:
Originally Posted by Rooksx
Any recommendations for literary crime fiction? I’ve got a weakness for detective stories but am not interested if the prose is flat and cliche-ridden, and the characters are little more than placeholders moving through the story.
Richard Price. I've only read two,
The Whites and
Lush Life. Both are solid and will satisfy your criteria (i.e. no clichés, good characterization);
Joyce Carol Oates has a great review of
The Whites in
The New Yorker; it begins: “As the sonnet was the quintessential form of the Elizabethan poet, packing distilled and dazzling language into its sleek fourteen lines and challenging every virtuoso of the day, so the quintessential form of the contemporary crime writer is the interrogation: two individuals in a room, one of them the suspect and the other the detective.”
Michael Chabon wrote a nice review of
Lush Life, which looks at Price’s earlier career and strongly recommends, in addition to that novel,
Clockers, and
Samaritan. He characterizes Price's writing as a "postmodern commingling of irony and yearning."
https://www.nybooks.com/articles/200.../in-priceland/
Writing this makes me think I should now read more of his books.
Last edited by RussellinToronto; 09-20-2018 at 11:36 AM.