I don’t loathe him, but I think he’s a case of replicative fading. The Firm was excellent, Time to Kill still really good, Client not bad, but then with each succeeding one they got more repetetive and more “damn, I gotta turn this in Monday or I don’t get the $5 million advance” rushed and hackneyed feeling.
But Pelican was written when he was still actually fresh.
This is a major reason to read the novel- Toole’s use of dialects (several different ones: NOLA Italian, NOLA Irish, NOLA black, NOLA upscale, etc.) was dead-on from what I’ve heard when visiting the city (long after Toole’s death) and a key part of what makes the novel so great. Also, his descriptions of the working class areas and the Quarter and the contrast between the places (i.e. tourist v. resident) was great.
BTW, have you been to New Orleans, Sahara Tea (especially in summer)? It makes a major difference in appreciating the novels. A friend who was a Vietnam vet said it reminds him a lot of Saigon (the heat, humidity, smell of “jungle plants rotting”, etc.). A feeling that’s hard to describe is that of walking from an air conditioned room (where to quote somebody somewhere whose name I don’t remember, the room is kept so cold from the AC that on a day that temperature in March the same resident would turn on the heat) straight onto the streets of a summer day; it’s almost like diving into a hot tub because the air is literally a hot wet force that hits you in the face.