<< it's a wonder that Chandler, Macdonald, et al. could
make sunny
California so bleak. >>
Decloaking to riposte with the rather obvoius:
It is clear, then, that you don't live there. ;-j
Neither do I, for that matter, and Cali has never seemed
bleak to me on my
occasional sojourns to that state. However, Atlanta, where I
currently
reside, is a nasty little town (I am encouraged by the recent
citations of
books set here; I am in pursuit . . .).
The finest HB fiction uses locale as another character
(hellfire, the finest
fiction does). Corruption exists wherever human desire does.
But serious
rot only sets in when either all desires are fulfilled or all
desires will be
forever unfulfilled. And there's always some jackal there to
sell you hope
whether you have everything or nothing. That's the city I
want to visit when
I crack the covers of a hardboiled book. But I have to
believe in that city.
California, and LA in particular, has served America
extremely well as a
locus of desire, even going so far as to manufacture and
export it
(non-fiction reccomendation: _City_of_Quartz_ by Mike Davis;
a "history" of
LA). I believe in the corruption Chandler, et al excavate
because I
"know"--and desire--California. I am likely to be much more
sceptical if the
novelist takes me to Bangor, Maine (recommendations
welcome).
Sure, I'll believe in human passions no matter where the
story is set, but I
don't in general read mysteries. A corpse is just a dead
stiff and I don't
much care how it got that way. Give me a character searching
for himself in
a society on the edge of collapse and I'll follow you to
hell--and be
disappointed if we don't get there.
--myshmysh
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