I vaguely recall
that the puzzle in _The Thin Man_ was arguably lifted from
Sheridan LeFanu's fine mystery _Wylder's Hand_. Certainly
_The Dain Curse_ is an updated rendition of the Radcliffe
style Gothic, just as
_The Maltese Falcon_ can be regarded as kind of a riff on
_The Moonstone_. I also think that you could look at the
early "casebook" style detective shorts as a kind of
precursor to the thirst for vicarious realism that informed
some of the hardboiled stuff.
I believe that a
lot of this semi-realism can be found in the stuff that
predates the Sherlock Holmes stories. For instance, though
Dickens's Inspector Bucket is usually a bit of a comic
character, Dickens appears to have drawn him from a real life
model (whose name escapes me) and he is anything but comic in
the episode where he walks into the London underworld....a
touch of the Ed McBain there.
A.N. Smith said:
>The professor said about my thought, "To equate pulp
with
>gothic is to do violence to both terms."
This seems like one of those opaque,
academic commnets that sounded great when I was 18, but which
have left me scratching my head ever since. Since pulp
writers range from Stephen Crane to Robert Leslie Bellem,
pulp is no sort of catagory to begin with. Gothic is almost
as broad, as the few examples already brought up by list
members demonstrate. Both "Noir" and
"Gothic" are unhelpful terms to an extent, insofar as they
represent an attitude and an ambience rather than a
particular type of story or technique.
James
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