The grand list of overused clichés was not mine. I found that it on a web page that expired so I resurected it and used it as my own. It has been stolen and cloned by a dozen other websites, but there is one site out on 50megs that may be the original owner’s site. It seems to have lots of peripheral pages about the original author. Either the original author of the cliche list has restarted his site, or someone has cloned it from the pages of the wayback machine.

In the mean time I have made the cliche list interactive and I have many more cliches than the original list had. I decided to get rid of the original list because I do not own it, but I kept the user generated ones.

I kept the same categories, but used different icons. I changed much of the text, but left the intent of the original.

I am still at the top of the list in Google for Science Fiction Cliches, so I hope I stay this way.

I found that I was still getting hits on a page called Sellframe. This was a very old frames based system where I had once organized all of the Science Fiction submission stuff.

You can see all the underlying pages on the right hand menu.

The main link was: 17 Steps to Writing and Selling a Science Fiction Story

My Mom is now volunteering at the New City Library. She’s helping Senior Citizens fill out their income taxes. She doesn’t know anything about income tax law, she just does triage on the people that come in and make sure that they qualify for the free service and that they brought the tax documents that they need. Mom got talked into this by her best friend BJ (not an appropriate name for a 76 year old woman.) BJ was Mom’s roommate back in Saint Luke’s nursing school in the late 1940s. BJ spent the last 20 years doing hard time for murder — it’s a long story. Now that she’s out, she and Mom hang out. You can tell that BJ was the girl that came into the dorm and talked Mom into going out and hitting the bars, even when there was a test the next morning.

While she was at the library, Mom hit the bargain bin and bought me a couple of books on tape. This is a review of one of the tapes, Find a Victim by Ross McDonald.

Ross McDonald is considered one of the masters of the Hard-Boiled Detective yarn. He is similar in many ways to Raymond Chandler, but the hard detective patter is a little more sophisticated with literary references and some good descriptive prose. Ross has his detective, Lew Archer, fall into murder and mayhem in a small California town. Archer investigates murderers, drug addicts, child molesters and an assortment of perverts in search of hijacked booze. There are an interesting cast of characters and never a dull moment. The tape is read by Tom Parker, who I have listened to before on other tapes. He is a good reader, especially for detective fiction. He has a quick clipped way of reading, but his voice is a little higher than the one I hear in my head when I read these stories. Blackstone Audio Books does a good job in the production, announcing the end of each side and clearly reading the tape number and side at the beginning. This sounds like a little thing, but I don’t like it when Random House or one of the other big name publishers doesn’t bother with this small detail that so improves the experience.

The writing is very good in the book, but some of Ross MacDonald’s style leaves me feeling a little uneasy. He tends to view women in a corpse light – as dead things. The women are always passive or stupid and they are motivated out of blind passion or insanity. Women are never reasonable or even very real in the books. Written in 1954, I suppose that the book is a reflection of the times. Detectives made love to women or slapped them around in these old books. It is unsettling, though, in modern times. One of the characters has raped his daughter, but he never did any time for it and it seems to be a minor point in the book, only used to explain why the daughter doesn’t live with him any more.

There is one thing that I found a little silly. MacDonald describes a woman who is addicted to Marijuana. Her reaction to the drug is bizarre. It is obvious that MacDonald had no first hand knowledge of the use of reefer and its effects, even though he got the vocabulary correct.

If you like hard-boiled fiction, this is a very well done book. I enjoyed the plotting, although the discovery of the real killer was a little bit of a let-down for me. I expected more action at the end, possibly with a shoot out with the killer. The end was a little soft. It relies on MacDonald’s 1950s view of women to be believable. There is a good shoot-out near the end, though, just to satisfy those of us who need it.

Check out Ross MacDonald it you get a chance. The stories are easier to follow than Chandler’s and he is better stylist, although Chandler had the hard-boiled vocabulary down. Just remember that MacDonald is a product of his times.