http://www.charliegillett.com/phpBB2/vi ... highlight=
Garth's post there says
When the film of Cormac McCarthy's No Place For Old Men gets released here it may reflect - albeit very lightly - on this situation.
I read this novel a month ago, and it was fresh in my mind reading about the drug-related slaughters in parts of Mexico. McCarthy's tense thriller presents a well-trod formula: a bag of drugs money is found at the scene of a shoot out, and the man with the accidental fortune is pursued, and quickly becomes way out of his depth. One of the central characters - the enforcer? - is one of the most evil characters recent crime fiction has thrown up. His preferred method of execution is a high-pressure bolt gun, as used to kill cattle.
The novel is set in the early 1970s, now a generation before our own. The old cop, the single investigator, is seeing his old world going to hell and falling apart, the line between Good and Bad vanishing forever, with violence becoming motiveless and random, crime becoming senseless. The old guy is facing retirement and sees things changing for the worst - but we know, sitting here, that it's all going to sink even lower.
The book is not clear cut as regards the Whos and Whys, and the resolution is not the way you think it ought to go, but that's the way that McCarthy decided to write it. Bleak. Very bleak.
Early reviews of the Coen Brothers film of this book are sounding good. If they've merely filmed the book scene for scene then they're on a winner.