I read a Lee Child recently - he is the best-selling thriller author from the UK based in the US. His hero is Jack Reacher, loner, ex-military cop, tough guy. The plots are intricate and ludicrous, but satisfying in a Charles Bronson meets Tom Clancy sort of way. When younger I enjoyed Alistair MacLean's novels a great deal, published in Fontana editions. One point though - Reacher is very very ruthless. He kills, on average, ten to twelve people in each book, I'd reckon, by strangulation, throat-slitting, and brain smashing (usually using powerful guns). He is usually "justified" because the killers are ultra-sadistic killers or terrorists threatening the American way of life, and people Reacher loves or cares for. Of course, he takes the law way into his own hands, and squeezes it there until it looks all broken and funny. Good clean fun? No. Red-blooded pulp for boys? Maybe. More Spillane than Chandler, Child is a good terse prose writer, with a touch of style. But hasn't his "hero" murdered about 150 to 200 men and women through the series, by now? That's serial killing, more than vigilante justice, no?
When you open your mouth to speak, are you smart? A funny question from a great song, but also, a good one, when it comes to poets, and poetry. We tend to have a very ambiguous view of intelligence in poetry, one that I'd say is dysfunctional. Basically, it goes like this: once you are safely dead, it no longer matters how smart you were. For instance, Auden was smarter than Yeats , but most would still say Yeats is the finer poet; Eliot is clearly highly intelligent, but how much of Larkin 's work required a high IQ? Meanwhile, poets while alive tend to be celebrated if they are deemed intelligent: Anne Carson, Geoffrey Hill , and Jorie Graham , are all, clearly, very intelligent people, aside from their work as poets. But who reads Marianne Moore now, or Robert Lowell , smart poets? Or, Pound ? How smart could Pound be with his madcap views? Less intelligent poets are often more popular. John Betjeman was not a very smart poet, per se. What do I mean by smart?
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When I was in France recently I started reading 'Nothing to Lose' by Lee Child. I was half-way through it when our holiday ended. I am mildly tempted to buy a copy so I can finish it off - a feeble temptatation that I have thus far successfully resisted!
Best wishes from Simon