Back in the 90s, my wife and I had a video production company in the Florida Keys. One of our projects was a weekly local entertainment TV show, and author interviews were among our regular features. We shot it at our house, and made the authors a really nice lunch (I love to cook!), so word got around the relatively small circle of South Florida crime novelists, and we had a bunch of them on, some of whom became friends.
Randy was only on twice, but he was a gem of a guy. If you like Doc Ford, I can also point you to Les Standiford's "Deal" series, starting with 1993's
Done Deal. Les is a prolific author of non-fiction as well as fiction, and literary fiction as well as crime fiction. He's also the head of the writing program at FIU, and widely respected among the authorial crowd as one of their best. Also a supremely nice guy. Both he and Randy radiate a sweetness that's rare, and it makes me like their books more.
There's a whole strain of supremely outlandish South Florida caper novels. Some of these widely miss the mark (easy to do with farce). Of the ones who hit the mark more often than not, Elmore Leonard is at the top of the heap, even though a lot of his best stuff isn't set in Florida. We didn't get to cook for him (we met him in Miami Beach), but he'd heard the news of our making lunch for authors who came to visit us in Key Largo that landed us the interview.
The book we spoke to him about was his first novel featuring a Kentucky lawman named Raylan Givens, who'd been introduced in the short story "Fire In The Hole", which served as the basis for the pilot of
Justified some years later.
Carl Hiaasen is my favorite of the outlandish South Florida writers, and his debut,
Tourist Season, is superlative, one of the all-time greats imo. It was followed by another hall-of-famer in Native Tongue, which introduced the one-eyed former governor nicknamed Skink, who went crazy trying to fight corruption, and abandoned his office to live in the swamps, living off roadkill. The whole Skink 8-book series is a ride, but he's got a couple of other short series (two novels each) that are also terrific. They're all winners, as is Carl, another genuinely lovely guy. He's also a bare-knuckle chronicler of South Florida corruption and environmental havoc for the Miami Herald until he retired last year, and three volumes of his columns have been collected, all of them also terrific, if depressing.
I started reading Lee Child soon after the turn of the century, when he'd "only" released his first eight or so Reacher novels.
We devoured all of those in a couple of weeks, and after that, ya kinda have to read them all, right? LOL So we have. Twenty six and a short story collection so far. Only about two-thirds are winners, but that's a pretty good batting average, and even the bad ones are okay. The thing is, there's a fine line between catharsis and cruelty, and Reacher himself is pretty clear that he doesn't care too much about where that line is.
I LOVED the second Cruise Reacher movie, as much for Cobie Smulders, who I think Hollywood is underutilizing. She kicks some serious butt in this, and the story as a whole leans much more into Reacher's (and Cruise's) intelligence than his brawling, so the gap in brawn between the two versions of the character is less obvious.
(Speaking of Cobie, her character in the TV series
Stumptown is be the best portrayal of a hard-boiled PI since Bogart, certainly on television. Alas, canceled after a single short season, but worth looking for.)
The thing I don't like about the TV Reacher is that he's too sculpted. Child also describes Reacher as built like a boulder, so in my mind, it was always more like a powerlifter. NOT SHREDDED. NO ABS. The guy playing TV Reacher is exactly like the giant gym rats that Book Reacher gleefully dispatches as he's scolding them for wasting time in the gym. LOL
We stopped watching in the middle of the first season and won't be watching more because, as you saw
@Oldscruggsfan, the violence that you can look away from on the page isn't as easy to skip on the screen. The balance is off, at least for me. I still look forward to a new Reacher novel every year, though!
One more recommendation following Child is Harlan Coben. He's becoming more famous for atmospheric, "long-buried secrets surfacing" gothic dramas that the BBC is serializing, but I first encountered him as a more straight-on mystery author. I'm not a snob about adaptations in general, I swear, but I don't like any of these BBC series based on his books. LOL I do love
every book he's written -- 35 I think! And yes, ALL winners. I'd suggest starting where he (and I) did, with a series of mysteries featuring a college basketball star turned sports agent Myron Bolitar, beginning with
Deal Breaker.
Coben is the first author to have won all of the top prizes for mystery writers -- the Edgar, Shamus, and Anthony awards -- and bunches of others besides. Not nearly as violent as Reacher, but still very intense, high-stakes stuff with a much clearer ethical code. Not that Reacher isn't ethical, of course, just that his primary ethical value is flattening bad guys, which necessarily reduces the number of his dimensions as a character by design.
btw, I used to be a bookseller, and I was mostly reading mysteries in those years, so once I start recommendations, especially along these lines, it's kinda hard to stop.
