Letters to the Editor

To the Editor: I love “Chinatown,” and am excited to read “The Big Goodbye,” Sam Wasson’s book about it. However, I can assure Mark Horowitz that the “brilliance” of Roman Polanski’s films will not “outlast the squalid memory of his crimes,” as Horowitz states at the end of his review (March 15). In fact, Polanski will be remembered primarily for his crime of raping a 13-year-old girl and his cowardly French fugitive status. Mia Gutierrez Beverly Hills, Mich.

♦ To the Editor: Mark Horowitz’s claim that “The Big Goodbye” is “part of a welcome and newish publishing trend” of deeply researched books about a single movie overlooks the work of Aljean Harmetz, who as far back as the 1970s was chronicling the production of classic films. She authored books about “The Wizard of Oz” and “Gone With the Wind” and — my favorite — “Round Up the Usual Suspects: The Making of ‘Casablanca. ’” Dan Steinbock Guilford, Conn. To the Editor: If you read Leo Damrosch’s exhaustive review of “The Man in the Red Coat,” by Julian Barnes (March 8), you might be tempted to skip reading the book itself.

Don’t. The whole is much more than the sum of its parts, even as its minutiae and digressions make you impatiently flip pages to get back to Dr. Samuel Jean Pozzi’s story. A lesser-known character in the colorful Belle Époque, he is worth learning about just for his accomplishments in advancing the field of gynecology, quite apart from the fact that he was the personal physician of a few luminaries of the time.

Despite all its tangents, this is a fascinating read. Paula Zevin Somerset, N. J. To the Editor: Confirming a trend I’ve noticed with annoyance on bookstore shelves, fully three of the novels reviewed in the March 15 issue had writers as their protagonists: Lee Durkee’s “The Last Taxi Driver,” Teddy Wayne’s “Apartment” and Laura Zigman’s “Separation Anxiety.

” Not to mention a memoir from a writer: Elizabeth Tallent’s “Scratched. ” Based on the reviews, all the aforementioned writers appear to be frustrated in some way. Maybe they could find some satisfaction in writing about people with a job title different from their own. There are lots of us out here.