HORRIBLE HARD-BOILED

 So there I was, reading one of my favorite thoroughly unrealistic fantasy “human” superhero tough guys, when what should befall me but a sentence that read roughly like this:

            “I got up that Monday and I put my wallet in my pocket, my butt in my pants, my feet in my shoes, and I strode out to the OK Corral and I blew six or eight miscreants from here to Mars and I sat down to a nice ham sandwich, and I washed it down with a Bud.”

            Okay, hard-boiled writers, I’m serving notice—enough already! I know it’s gotta be fun to strap your Glock to your laptop and pretend you’re some sort of cross between Hemingway and Chandler, but somebody’s actually paying you to churn out some halfway decent prose here. Could you just give the cheap theatrics a rest? Here’s the top reasons who no one should ever write a sentence like the one above:

 5. Nobody cares about the minute details of your detective’s toilet—everyone puts their wallet in their pocket and their butt in their pants.

4.     Strunk & White said, “More than one conjunction per sentence shall be punishable by the enforced reading of no more than eleven nor less than three 1930s cozies.”  Or they should have.

3.     Third-graders get flunked for failing to construct complex sentences.

2.     Boredom is no excuse for monkeying around on the keys. (That is, when you have a contract.) If you’re Joe Schmoe, do what you like, but if  you’re somebody like Robert Crais (and it wasn’t Robert Crais I was reading, okay?—that's just an example), you better flex a little writing muscle. I’m paying good money here.

1.     Sure it’s fun to watch those kind of silly sentences burble rhythmically over hill and dale, but that’s only if you’re the writer. If you’re the reader, here’s the problem: You’ve seen it before and you’ve seen it before and you’ve seen it before and you’ve seen it before.

         And you had to avert your eyes the first time.