Kevin Burton Smith wrote:
> America - I've just learnt about it.
> What? Didn't Columbus mention it?
No, he kept quiet. It was that Amerigo guy who got all the
credit. (These foreign idioms are sometimes so *exotic* that
it's not easy to tell things with them. Try to say it in
Finnish!)
> After all, most of us don't go down very mean
streets on a day to day basis, even
> Americans, and
> despite the occasional outburst of macho posturing,
most of us are
> smart enough not to want to.
Nor would I want to be a Philip Marlowe.
> Oh, and one quibble. Americans and Canadians are not
interchangeable.
I figured out as much, but it just came out of my fingers.
Sorry if I offended anyone, American or Canadian.
> But I find hard-boiled books set outside the U.S.
really intriguing,
> the way an originally very American idiom has been
adapted and
> retooled to fit every country in the world.
Sometimes it's an easy
> fit, and sometimes it requires major retooling, but
overall,
> generally, whether the book is good or bad, the
result is usually
> very interesting, and often fascinating.
You obviously haven't read any German spy thrillers like
Jerry Cotton or Rex McCormick? Awful stuff, nothing
fascinating about them. But I wouldn't say "every country".
Vietnamese hardboiled thriller? Russian one? (Well, maybe
now, but even then it seems so - exotic.) But then again, we
just saw there were Liberian hardboiled thrillers.
(Accidentally, John B. West isn't mentioned in the dictionary
of African writers. I just checked.)
Juri
jurnum@utu.fi
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