Wading Through Second-Rate Art

I jettisoned the mass market crime novel I was reading on a bench at the Central Square subway stop and am glad to be rid of it; watched Edward G. Robinson in Little Caesar on DVD last night and Kieslowski's The Double Life of Veronique this afternoon and it's hard to say which was the more boring, the more lifeless, the more phony, so my subway reading will have to switch back to Mickey Spillane, who is a crappy writer in many ways, but at least there is the occasional whiplash line, unlike the mass market crime novel which limped along like a three-legged dog that had never been taught to speak, and praise be to God I have found my copy of Tsipi's Retelling which had been missing around the house here for some weeks, I want to finish rereading that; Mickey Spillane I picked up at Rodney's because I knew the name and was curious to see how he stacked up against Raymond Chandler, and it was half price, and it had a soft-focus head shot of a blonde in black and white on the cover. Chandler is approximately three times as talented as Spillane, three times as enjoyable. Veronique was so contrived and tedious I don't even want to bother to go to Tomatoes or  Movie Review Query Engine and have an esteemed critic unravel it all for me and explain what a "masterpiece" it is.