All the Ms: MacBrides

MacBride, Roger Lea: It's hard not to perceive MacBride as capitalizing on Laura Ingalls Wilder fame. He proclaimed himself the "adopted grandson" of Rose Wilder Lane, and she apparently accepted that relationship. But then, it's hard not to see Rose Wilder Lane as capitalizing on her mother's fame. 

I read the beginning of Little Farm in the Ozarks. And I couldn’t shake the feeling that I was reading a nostalgic view of a time period rather than a child's almost ruthless memory of that same time period. 

MacBride, Stuart: In the Venn diagram of life, the Logan McRae novels fall into a narrow subgenre that I don't care for. 

Within the mystery genre, there are cozies, noir, hardboiled, police procedurals, spy, thriller, amateur detective....

I like some of these subgenres. I dislike others. I read only some books within specific subgenres but not others and so on...

Generally speaking, I avoid crime fiction--that is police procedurals which focus on grime and hardships and unfairness as well as the detectives' personal troubles. 

It's a very fine line. Blue Bloods, I like. Early CSI and Law & Order, I like. I got through less than one episode of Hill Street Blues. I watched the first season of Prime Suspect about a dozen times but lost interest in the others. 

Part of the difference is tone. But the other part is that crime fiction almost always seems to have a political angle. In Blue Bloods, this angle is honestly stated with Frank Reagan and One PP. Yet Blue Bloods manages to bring the politics into focus, make them everyday, multifaceted, and even domestic.

Too many times with crime fiction, the politics seem to be about all the hoops the protagonists have to jump through: the meetings to attend; the dog-eat-dog maneuverings to undertake. It's a lot like mafia or, for that matter, vampire stories in which the internecine feuding is the whole point. 

And I don't care.

In the Cold Dark Ground, a Stuart MacBride Logan McRae novel: although the number of police involved is more accurate than one detective and his pal, I discovered that I didn't want to keep track. I do that for Russian novels, not much else (and I rarely finish Russian novels). 

In fairness, MacBride's dialog between the police officers reminded me of The Fugitive, which, by the way, I love.

Go figure.