[Prev][Next][Index][Thread]

RARA-AVIS: The Hardboiled Era checklist. 

  I was reading _Hardboiled America: The Lurid Years of Paperbacks by
Geoffrey O'Brien. A book published 1981 that recounts the story of the
early days of the Ameican paperbacks back when some of the covers were
far more racy and spicy that what showed up between them. (Overdone
necromantic cheese-cake for Rex Stouts' _Case Of The Red Box?)

  But one of the things I found most interesting about his book was
his, The Hardboiled Era: A Checklist, 1929-1958, that he had in the
back of the book. I had never really thought of there being a
`hardboiled era' but what he said made sence to me. That the hardboild
novel was not a series of isolated literary works, but part of an
ongoing cycle. Where each success had its effects on the books that
came afterwards in that highly competitive and innovative time.

 He does not deal with short stories, but only with novels. And he has
some interesting picks for books that are part of the `Hardboiled Era.'

  There are the ones that you know have to be there. Hammett's _Red
Harvest 1929 is the first, along with among many others James M. Cain,
David Goodis, Cornell Woolrich, the MacDonald and so forth. But he also
put in some that surprised me more then a bit. Such as...

  Would you place in a listing of hardboiled novels such works as the
ones below?

Three of S.S. Van Dine's Philo Vance novels.
Tobacco Road by Erskine Caldwell
Sanctuary by William Faulkner
Junkie by William Burroughs
The Subterraneans by Jack Kerouac
Case Of The Velvet Claw by Erle Stanley Gardner (first Perry Mason)
and the first four James Bond's from Ian Fleming!

  Okey, I will give you the early Perry Mason's, and maybe a hardboiled
Bond (just the books, not the later films!) But Philo Vance?!? Sure Van
Dine was the best selling American mystery author at the time, and so
might have had an effect on some. But he put him as a part of the hard
ear? I thought that one of the ideas was that Hammett and Chandler and
others were geting as far from that kind of stuff as you could get, so
how does he rate being there?

  Anyway, what do you think of the idea of there being a `hardboiled
era?' And do the above belong on it?
-
# RARA-AVIS:  To unsubscribe, say "unsubscribe rara-avis"
# to majordomo@icomm.ca

[Archives] | [RARA-AVIS]