on 4/18/00 12:23 AM, Etienne Borgers at
freeweb@rocketmail.com wrote:
> You want blues, you want it grim, somber and
Noir:
> 'Strange Fruits' by Billie Holiday.
> E.Borgers
> Hard-boiled Mysteries
> http://www.geocities.com
Without going into the noire/hard boiled issues, I always
thought Billy Holiday's classic cuts (without satin strings)
would be the perfect background music to the Chandler scenes
in roadhouse casinos and on gambling ships.
Robert Johnson has come up a lot recently. I always thought
his music would play great in early thirties Black Mask
stories, particularly on radios in black bar scenes, honky
tonks, and when a detective goes to a meet in a black man's
room. All these scenes also appear in Chandler's
novels.
Obviously Holiday and Johnson would play great in Walter
Mosley's novels. He even wrote one about an aging blues
singer, RL's Dream. In a recent, somewhat garbled posting
(sorry) I mentioned Iceberg slim as my pick for the greatest
overlooked, black, hard boiled, outlaw memoir novelist of the
20th Century. I think Mosley is one of the greatest new
novelists of any color to also write in the classic Black
Mask tradition. His work is literature, with depth, important
themes, and brilliant characterizations. I liked Always
Outnumbered, Always Outgunned--a short story collection that
also works as a novel; or is it a novel that also works as a
short story collection? Shades of Faulkner's Go Down
Moses.
Keith
keithdeutsch@earthlink.net
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