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RARA-AVIS: Is V.I. Warshawski hardboiled? 

On Tue, 14 Jan 1997, michael david sharp wrote:

: I guess what I'm saying is, the distinction between V.I. novels and
: the Hardboiled genre needs to be made more clearly. Is the detective
: too conscientious?  Too concerned about social mores?  Does she
: actually care about other human beings besides herself?  Does she
: fail properly to enjoy brutalizing other human beings?  What makes
: her not hardboiled?

I got _Tunnel Vision_ (1994) out of the library and started it
yesterday, but I put it down after 50 pages and I won't go back.  It's
not hardboiled, but what's worse is that it's not well written.  I
can't find the couple of sentences that really stood out, but there
were some paragraphs that looked like examples of "descriptive
writing" straight out of a _Writer's Digest_ handbook.

The book seems to concern V.I. and her involvement with a battered
women's shelter, a homeless mother of three who fled an abusive
husband, and something about why the shelter can't get a new building
built (corruption at City Hall?).  

Now, V.I. is conscientious, concerned about social mores and other
people, and doesn't like smashing in faces.  Still, I don't want to
fall into the trap of saying it isn't this that makes her not
hardboiled, because hardboiled detectives don't have to be
sociopaths, and rarely are.

Probably this book could have been truly hardboiled, if written
differently, and still kept much the same plot.  The narrator would
have to be different, though.  V.I. talks about herself too much.  The
more hardboiled the detective, the more they become ciphers, blanks.
Also, she has a social life in the book.  HB dicks usually don't.  In
the Paul Pine book I just finished, Pine comes back to his apartment
one night and mentions there were two messages relating to his social
life - and that's it.  He doesn't go hang out with some friends and
have coffee.  The friends a dick usually has, at least that we meet,
are cops he can cadge favours from.  This second point is fairly
minor, but the first is more important.

Overall, though, Paretsky doesn't give it the qualifying atmosphere.
The language and people aren't tough enough, the throw-away lines
aren't funny or ironic enough, there's no air of despair and
depression.  It didn't look like it would be a happy book, by any
means, but it wasn't hard enough.  It just didn't have *it*.  That's
the main reason I say it isn't hardboiled, and it's the toughest for
me to qualify.

There *could* be a hardboiled novel set in Chicago in the nineties with
a woman P.I. who helps out with a women's shelter, but this sure isn't
it.

Bill
-- 
William Denton : buff@vex.net     <-- Please note new address.
Toronto, Canada                   <-- I'm not at io.org any more.
http://www.vex.net/~buff/         Caveat lector.

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