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Title: interesting as a product of its time
Review: Jim Thompson's The Alcoholics was first published in 1953. The paperback copy I checked out is a Canadian edition from 1993. This guy is a crime writer (well, he was, he apparently died in 1977) with a supposedly (according to the New York Review of Books) literary bent.I found it interesting enough to read through to the end, but it seemed quite contrived and simplistic to me. I would imagine that's probably just a result of its being a product of its time, though. In any case, if real people were like the good and bad characters in the book, the world would probably be a much nicer place than it is, but perhaps not as interesting.
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