[QUOTE=JohnM]
I have a couple of things to catch up on (mostly the noirs he wrote under the penname Joe Kurtz), but my favorite genre author is Dan Simmons. The thing about Simmons is that while most of his fiction has been in the genre ghetto, he has moved between genres repeatedly. The list of novels for which he has won major awards covers fantasy, science fiction and horror:
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Although I haven’t read all Simmons’ SF, I might have included him on my list if I hadn’t just started (then thrown across the room about a third of the way through) Darwin’s Blade, a cliched and tedious detective story that starts with the eponymous investigator “solving” the infamous car-with-JATO-bottle-on-smashes-into-the-side-of-a-mountain urban legend, then shamelessly incorporates several other old gags and urban legends into its so-called plot. I was shocked that Simmons, whose “Joe Kurtz” novels (Hard as Nails, Hard Freeze, Hard Case) are gritty and ingenious, would be so unimaginative. (BTW, Joe Kurtz is the name of the protagonist in those books, not Simmons’ pen name.)
My 100-percenters include the previously mentioned Jane Austen, Isaac Asimov, and Robert Heinlein as well as:
Dashiell Hammet. Sadly, he didn’t write much.
P.G. Wodehouse. You might argue that many of the stories are very similar, but even if you get tired of the similarities, they are all consistently good.
Agatha Christie. I haven’t read much of her stuff recently, but when I was reading her I enjoyed the stories and admired how she could always give you enough information to figure out the answer if you were clever, while twisting the plots enough to avoid becoming too formulaic.
Lawrence Block, whom I’ll include despite one notable dud: Hitman 2. I had never heard of Block when I picked up the first Hitman book at the airport for something to read on the plane, and loved it. (It’s a series of interlocking short stories about a contract killer who happens to kill people who deserve it. Witty, clever, and tight little tales.) I started on his other novels and enjoyed almost all of his various series, especially the Bernie Rhodenbarr “Burglar Who…” set. Then the sequel to Hitman came out, and it’s just awful. It completely betrays the masterfulness of the original. But the rest of his stuff is so good, I’ll let it slide. (So maybe I should let Simmons slide, too, huh?)
