Re: RARA-AVIS: Picking at the Falcon

Diane Trap (trap@rhett.libs.uga.edu)
Mon, 20 Apr 1998 13:04:36 -0400 (EDT) > Bill, if you are just finding this "slip" you have been "nodding" <g>.
> Just remember in the words of the great Bob Wade "you can't outline
> Chandler" and in my opinion, you can't outline Hammett either. That is
> why men read those books and women read Agatha Christie--men like
> stories and women like characters (although anyone who says Christie
> "developed characters" is also nodding)

Y'know, Mari, assigning readership based on gender just puts my
knickers in a twist. I would give Christie (happily--can't stand her)
to those people who favor tight plotting (like written-from-an
-outline tight), knotty problems (like locked room mysteries), and tidy
endings--her books have the emotional punch of the daily crossword.

Writers like Chandler and Ellroy and Hammett feature freewheeling
storytelling and unhealthy overloads of moral ambiguities, and yes,
characters, characters, characters, from the creepy yellow-eyed
Sam Spade to the paladinesque Marlowe to Ellroy's cast of thousands.

I'd flounder among generalities some more but I have to go back to
work now. More later, maybe.

-----Diane Trap
trap@rhett.libs.uga.edu

> --
> >From Mari Hall Found.Dead.In.Texas@airmail.net
> whose DOROTHYL nom is Kate Warne the ex-Pinkerton in
> The Woman With the Rose Tattoo by Mari Hall
> See y'all at Bouchercon 29 in Philly Oct.1-4
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