The Backstabbers:
Writers on Other Writers

I dunno. most crime and mystery writers I know are pretty decent. But every now and then jealousy or pettiness or whatever the hell it is rears its ugly head...

• "I hope the day will come when I donít have to ride around on Hammett and James Cain, like an organ grinderís monkey. Hammett is all right. I give him everything. There were a lot of things he could not do, but what he did he did superbly. But James Cain -- faugh! Everything he touches smells like a billygoat. He is every kind of writer I detest, a faux naif, a Proust in greasy overalls, a dirty little boy with a piece of chalk and a board fence and nobody looking. Such people are the offal of literature, not because they write about dirty things but because they do it in a dirty way."
  -- Raymond Chandler on James M. Cain, in a letter to his publisher

More to come as I think of 'em....