Re: RARA-AVIS: Marxist in the third person narrative

James Rogers (jetan@ionet.net)
Sat, 2 Aug 1997 18:45:35 -0500 (CDT) At 07:03 PM 8/2/97 +0900, you wrote:
>
>I think the third person narrative is more hardboiled than the first person
>one, as you can see in the fine example of Dashiell Hammett's THE GLASS KEY
>and THE MALTESE FALCON, Paul Cain's THE FAST ONE, and Raymond Chandler's
>first mystery story, "Blackmailers Don't Shoot."
>
>Of course, you should write how characters feel only by their actions and
>talkings, not by getting into their brains. If you read above-mentioned
>masterpieces, you will get my drift. Chandler tried to do the third person
>narrative in his first story, but he must have found it very hard to
>accomplish. He soon started to write in the first person narrative.
>
>These days, so-called "hardboiled" gumshoes talk too much, brood too much,
>express their feelings too much, and justify or rationalize their actions
>too much--to pad books? I know they have feelings but please don't say it,
>just act it out and let readers think how they feel.
>
>Real hardboiled detective stories is too tough to write. There are very
>few writers practicing the real McCoy.
>
This is a much more articulate description of my complaint with the
current crop. The feet-on-the-desk,whiskey gargling PI has become good for
little more than parodies by Bill Cosby and Robert Townsend....not very
funny ones, because there is not very much difference between the satire and
the source. Frank McShane (sounds like an alias to me) pointed out in his
Chandler bio that RC could descend into burlesquing his own style, and even
as good a writer as Ross MacDonald feels this way to me a lot of the time.
I think this is probably why Hammett more or less jettisoned the whole
"private eye" business for his last couple of books. Chandler gets away with
it purely through his style, humor,and panache', but in less talented hands
it is almost a death sentence. This is not to say that I haven't read and
enjoyed Norbert Davis, George Coxe, Robert Bellum, etc....but I would
cheerfully trade everything they wrote for another book up to the standards
of THE GLASS KEY or FAREWELL, MY LOVELY.
It is not that there is anything wrong with first person narrative *per
se* .... as someone on here mentioned, it is pretty hard to conceive of THE
KILLER INSIDE ME being told in the third person....but I've just about had
enough of the PI "schtick". Lawrence Block has tried to freshen it up, and
James Ellroy I still have hopes for- however, it may be that the PI device
itself has become as stale and artificial as the eccentric, violin playing
amateur sleuths of yore.
As to the question of whether these PIs tended to be "proles", Chandler
said that they had to be or no one would have talked to them in the course
of their jobs. To this I would add that, almost to the last man, they have a
marked hostility to the shams and hypocrisies of society, and this hostility
generally leads them into conflict with the richest and most powerful
representatives of that society. It's no wonder that Marxist critics found
them fertile ground for comment. To my way of thinking, though, their
antecedent is more Huckelberry Finn than Trotsky.

James

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James Michael Rogers

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