RE: RARA-AVIS: Unrelated question:Hardboiled Mystery -- the
health and welfare of ...
Andy Hughes (AHughes@sbtinfo.com)
Fri, 17 Jul 1998 16:48:56 -0500
>>I started wondering... Is Ellery Queen a kind of
cozy? Is Nero Wolfe is
>>cozy?
>
I don't know enough about Queen to comment, but the Wolfe
series has
been a favorite of mine since about the age of 13, or for 18
years. Most
critics, and I tend to agree with them on this, see the Wolfe
series as
a combination of the cozy and hardboiled styles. Where Wolfe
most
certainly fit the criteria of a cozy (except for his
licensed,
professional status and very large fees) and the murders in the
series
tended not to take place on the mean streets but in corporate
offices
and drawing rooms, the series narrator (and real main
character), Archie
Goodwin, gave the series its tough man-of-action hardboiled
element (him
and the brownstone regulars, particularly Saul Panzer). First
objection,
I know, is that Goodwin was not a loner; true, he chose to
depend upon
Wolfe for employment, but as the Zeck trilogy showed, he could
also be
his own man, and his non-committal affair with Lily Rowan
suggests a
loner personality that's capable of limited social intercourse
(pun
intended). Rex Stout, the author, was an openly political
writer,
injecting the series with his own thoughts on WWII, the Red
Scare, J.
Edgar Hoover, Eastern European civil wars, Watergate and other
subjects
far removed from food and orchids.
In short, Rex Stout produced a hybrid of the two, and
depending upon the
reader's expectations, the series could easily be taken
solely as a cozy
because of Wolfe's exaggerated role.
>
>=========================================================
>Joseph M. Johnston, Ph.D.
johnston@netreach.net
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