DOROTHY B. HUGHES (best known for In A Lonely Place) is an author I've long intended to give the complete reading treatment but haven't because her books are rare in libraries, if they had them they got discarded for lack of readership before they became of feminist interest and of book collectors (I hope they're reading those books) and even the used ones are too expensive for me to buy all of them.
What little I've managed to get hold of is certainly superior to Theodore Chandler or Daschiell Hammett, which indicates that crap often sells better than the better stuff. When they made her best known novel into a movie and a period radio drama, they changed the story to demote the two successful sleuths who were women to elevate the role of the males in the story, probably has a lot to do with why she was less of a commercial success as she was a superior writer.
Commerce which can peddle civet shit coffee as a gourmet item and gull idiots into buying water that in most places in the US they could get of more reliable quality for free out of the tap, generating enormous mountains of plastic waste for "ecological reasons" is what moves popular consumption, nothing to do with quality. The entire pop music industry as well as Hollywood is geared to push shit and drive down quality. The pop kulcha criticism, review and, heaven help us, "studies" racket does the same, with increasingly bigger vocabularies toward the less up-market academic wanna-bees. They've made bullshit of the "humanities" too.
Update: No, he's turning to a stereotype of a schoolmarm so I'll add "Fussy Knickers" to the list of names for him. So funny, a fussy old man reconditioning his youthful garage band crap and rock criticism columns so the future can forget them, anyway. But if he wants to provide me with the opportunity to point it out, it would be cruel of me to not take it on a holiday weekend. I'll bet he was always a suck-up to adults, people with authority over others and celebrities, how he got into the line he got into.
Update 2: Fussy Knickers is the one who's always telling other people he's a great writer and just a brilliant thinker when he can't even accurately report what I've said in one of my shorter posts. As ol' Bertie Russell said, stupid men can't tell you what smarter men said because a. they don't understand what was said and b. they inevitably translate it into something they're capable of thinking. Stupy wasn't born stupid, he was made that way by TV, Hollywood and pop music. Of course, he could have chosen a different path but he took the path of least hard substance.
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