Lost in the Seventies: Historical Fiction without Time-Dropping

In my post on Raymond Benson’s Black Stiletto books, I complained that Benson’s treatment of period detail and references was really heavy-handed. Last week I read a couple that did a much better job.
First Quarry by Max Allan Collins is a retcon in which series protagonist Quarry, a professional hitman, takes on his first job for the mysterious Broker. A theoretically simple job (case a college professor’s home, whack him, destroy a manuscript he’s working on) turns complicated (of course) due to the professor’s busy, busy sex-life, a snooping PI, disgruntled boyfriends and black mobsters among other factors.
The book is good (though I think Collins has a much better hardboiled voice in his Nathan Heller books), but what really leaped out at me were the period references. There’s never any big emphasis on detail, just a constant stream of touches: Songs on the radio, clothes, split-level homes, cars, TV shows. As someone who was a teen in this period, it’s very evocative; I’m guessing even someone TYG’s age would get a clear sense of period, even if references to Bonanza don’t strike any particular chord.
Among Others by Jo Walton gets the job done by referencing books. Her protagonist, Morwenna, is an SF/fantasy nerd, so the period references come in the form of authors: Samuel Delany, Roger Zelazny, Tolkien (of course), Stephen Donaldson as we get into the late seventies. I’m not sure this is quite as effective at capturing a period (authors stick around for later generations in a way fashions and prime-time TV don’t), but given Walton’s a fantasy writer, it seems reasonable a lot of the audience will get the references (though there were one or two that left me blank). And it does sound like the kind of book reviews someone would have written in their diary, rather than diary entries that expound too heavily on pop-culture the way Benson did.
I did get the references, even though they didn’t strike much of an emotional chord (a lot of Morwenna’s taste is too far off from mine—and apparently English libraries didn’t stock Andre Norton the way every school library in the 1970s seemed to over here).
Despite Among Others winning a Hugo, I didn’t care for the book at all, but that’s because it’s primarily a mundane coming-of-age novel (the fantasy elements are well done, but they’re minor by comparison) and those bore me to tears (stories of Growing Up Welsh/German/Jewish/Catholic in some past period likewise turn me off). But that said, I thought the execution was nicely done.