CALL ME SNAKE

I'm back from the Midwest, a trip capped off by a 1100-mile drive from Chicago to Boston by way of Vermont and New Hampshire. Along the way, I listened to several books on tape--including recent offerings of the detective genre--and based on what I heard, I can say that Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler need not worry about being supplanted. Robert Parker's latest creation, Sonny Randall, is many steps down from his Spencer oeuvre, which in turn was many steps down from Philip Marlowe. Stuart Kaminsky's Lew Fonesca series, which was recommended to me by a discerning friend, was good for a car drive. But there is a clear formula at play here--as well as a steady cast of characters--that you don't get in Hammet and Chandler books. So, as I've said before, the masters have not yet been surpassed. In my book the closest competition to those classics of a half century ago comes from: Elmore Leonard, Walter Moseley, and Henning Mankell.

On another note, CALL ME SNAKE is hard at work on a book about the mathematics that underlies string theory. As a result, CALL ME SNAKE is fairly busy these days and may not be posting as often or as regularly as he or she would like to. But maybe he'll be posting as often or as regularly as others would care to see. But that, of course, remains to be seen.