I read a fair amount of genre novels, mostly hard-boiled mystery, because, as Paul Auster says, they contain some of the best contemporary writing. They also require a certain formulaic element that allows for artistic freedom, in the same way the Western has done for filmmakers.
At the Hands of Another was written by in 1983 by Arthur Lyons (Lyons died in 2008) and is in many ways very much in the Raymond Chandler tradition: it is written in the first person, is part of a series about private eye Jacob Asch, takes place in Los Angeles, is elegantly written with low-key humor and minimal violence. It also is critical of the scamming that goes on when lawyers and doctors operate together to defraud, and includes a femme fatale who seeks Asch's help and abandons him after he helps her.
John Connolly's A Game of Ghosts (2017) is the sixteenth in his series of books about private eye Charlie Parker (yes, he likes jazz). Connolly is Irish and his novels are rather gory and overlaid with supernatural and fantasy elements and the assumption that evil exists and that Parker and his assistants, Angel and Louis, are among those sometimes called upon to root it out. Connolly writes, in his typically poetic way, influenced in style and subject by Milton, "it was another imperfect solution, but then it was an increasingly imperfect world."
Lyons writes in the first person, Connolly in the third, and Steve Hamilton, in Dead Man Running (2018) combines the two. The first-person part is Alex McKnight, who is yanked from his Upper Peninsula Michigan home to Arizona by the FBI: a serial killer will only talk to McKnight. Serial killers are not very interesting but McKnight's fish-out-of-water pursuit of the killer after he escapes reminds one of a Geoffrey Household novel, in McKnight's attempt to deal with a foreign landscape. It's an impressive outing by Steve Hamilton to go beyond the Upper Peninsula and expand what McKnight --and the reader -- know.
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