Word: murderously
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...fiction of mayhem crucially disturbing and very much worth the reading. The worst examples of the genre present the symptoms of our virulent malady in pure form, and a new Mickey Spillaine is not pleasant going, precisely because it has roughly the same significance as a fresh mass murder. The best books of the type offer symptomology, diagnosis, and like most good physicians (and all great works of art), a tentative prescription for treatment. Among living crime novelists, Ross MacDonald is simply the best of the best...
...sound knowledge of the impact produced on a human body by objects of diverse shape and size, and a vision of American life in which obsessive violence is not a chance phenomenon but an invariable condition. The Three Roads, a thriller about an amnesiac's torturous investigation of a murder he may well have committed himself, establishes MacDonald's interest in detailed and accurate psychological observation, and his regard for the complex reverberations of a guilty past in an uncertain present...
...writing, quality and quality alone is the first critical consideration. In his essay The Simple Art of Murder Raymond Chandler writes: "The detective story, even in its most conventional form, is difficult to write well. Good specimens of the art are much rarer than good serious novels." MacDonald's best work demands our consideration, not because the author is an intelligent man sincerely interested in serious issues, but because he has found in crime fiction a form perfectly appropriate to those interests, and in himself a talent capable of developing that form to a new level of complexity and interest...
...Gentle into That Good Night, had Melvyn Douglas shunted off to a nursing home by his grown children. ABC, in Johnny Belinda, showed Mia Farrow, in a waist-length wig, playing a deaf-mute who is raped and framed for murder; and an updated version of its 1966 documentary, The Long Childhood of Jimmy...
...There is a fort in the South where a few years ago a murder was committed." So begin both Carson McCullers' novel Reflections in a Golden Eye, and this film based on it. Thereafter the two follow divergent paths. In her book, love was a self-inflicted wound, and the South a theater of the absurd. Director John Huston spills the novel's poetry on the way to the screen, leaving only its gothic husk and a gallery of grotesques...