RE: RARA-AVIS: Hardboiled Architecture?

From: billha@ionet.net
Date: 19 May 2000


My first reaction to Dennis' question about hardboiled architecture in L.A. is to say that L.A. is probably one of those places which has urban renewed the hardboiled setting, sort of analogous to the comment that neo-noir takes place in daylight, mostly (ie.The Player).

...which in turn raises the question of whether we will always associate hardboiled or noir with period settings (as in Chinatown)--which is to say, for all of our discussion of contemporary hb writers, something in us perhaps says it's got to be or be similar to the feel of certain receding decades of the 20th Century. Is there a risk, in other words, of hb or noir fiction becoming
"about" a historical period, much as the Western (even revisionist Western) seems to be? (Is this list really about nostalgia?)

Thanks, Dennis, for helping us see who we really are....:)

Bill Hagen billha@ionet.net

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