After finally getting the pirate issue of Pulp into the printers, I started to read Duane Swierczynski's The Wheelman.
I said in an earlier post (about entirely different matters) that buzz around some new artefacts isn't necessarily enough to attract me. In this case, it's just the opposite. Everything I've heard about Swierczynski's book made me want to read it.
And nothing I heard was wrong. It's one great piece of action.
Elina was watching something related to her work on VHS and I sat beside her reading. At one point I raised my head and said: "I'm on page 29 and this guy who's mute and does criminal jobs as a driver has been stripped naked and pushed upside down to the industrial pipe that is so tight he can't move. He shot the other of the two guys who were harassing him and now he has to climb up from the pipe, still upside down."
I mean, page 29! This is how thrillers should be written. If this was some kind of techno or serial murder thriller stuff, this would happen in page 290 (if it would happen at all), after elaborate details on the background of the mute guy and his girlfriend and the killer's trauma after having been assaulted by his uncle and the football team and everyone would've visited Hong Kong or Brussels at least once. Nothing of that crap here. Here's some seriously hoping that Swierczynski finds his way to the Finnish audience!
Still have to pick this up. Duane himself keeps getting in my way, though...for example, in his responses to Gorman's interview questions on Ed's new blog, Duane refers to the free weekly he edits as Philadelphia's leading one, a conveniently vague way of not quite admitting that the CITY PAPER's distribution is still considerably less than that of his paper's rival, the older PHILADELPHIA WEEKLY...but, real soon now, I'll be reading Duane's story in the most recent Gorman annual, which has changed its name clumsily after being dropped by Tor/Orb in the US and picked up by Carroll & Graf...in a sense, it's an heir to the MYSTERY SCENE annuals which were also published by C & G some years back.
ReplyDeleteFor that matter, Real Soon Now I'll be getting back to short-story writing myself. If young punks like Duane and this Nummelin fellow are getting busy, no excuse for middle-aged flatulents to be lazing around.
Juri, thanks for the kind words. So glad you're digging it so far.
ReplyDeleteTodd--sorry to be getting in your way! I referred to our paper as the "top" alt weekly in terms of quality, not distribution. (Hey, I'm proud of the thing.)
And by some counts, we are older; we're celebrating our 25th anniversary this year. (The Weekly, built from the ashes of the Welcomat, was founded in the mid-1990s.)
Really not knowing what you're talking about (am not really familiar with the American weeklies) I think it's nice to have some traffic in here!
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