Elaine Ash perfectly summed up the work of Frank Bill:
His style is defined by direct, sharp, staccato sentences, and I think of him as the Ornette Coleman of the crime short. When Ornette first played horn in the 1950s, he was considered highly controversial with his cascade of bleeps, blats and squawks. Some critics dismissed him as a music illiterate. But jazz musicians and free thinkers recognized something very special in Ornette, and they were eventually proven correct by his exemplary career. Like Ornette, Frank Bill has a rhythm all his own, with a sentence structure that takes deliberate grammatical “license” to create a cadence in his prose.
And at BEAT to a PULP we are doing something a little different and featuring two of this extraordinary writer’s stories. “Tweakers” through Wednesday and then “The Need” the remainder of the week.
8 comments:
I've been looking forward to this...
Thanks for the links. I just read the article about Chandler. It was great!
Paul, It will not disappoint. You read something like "Tweakers" and you wonder why didn't I think of that? Then it occurs that only Frank Bill could. (I hope I'm not over hyping it but it is an impressive body of work he's accumulated in a short time.)
Barrie, It is a great piece on the master.
Hey David where did you get that photo? I love what "d" did with the logo. That shack isn't the entrance to the House of Blues on Sunset Boulevard, is it?
EA
Elaine, That's an old shack in Louisiana that we visited and d used her photoshop skills to place in the woods at night.
Beat to a Pulp is now a must read.
I want you to tell your parents next time you speak that they raised a son with lovely manners. Enough said.
Archavist, Thanks to stories like Jack Martin's The Devil's Right Hand coming up in June.
Patti, I will tell my Mom who is still kicking at eighty-three and will appreciate that.
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