> but I don't think you can say they're not
hardboiled
GOOD! Tell, me, then, what you mean by "hard-boiled", because
ones I've met were only "hard-boiled" in the peculiar sense
that things had gone so badly wrong (with their lives and
especially) in their heads that most of the ability to
control the direction of their lives had been boiled out of
them. That doesn't get me very far. It gets me into "noir",
perhaps; but these are only the secondary characters, the set
dressing. There's nothing romantic, nothing sexy, nothing
very gripping about people helplessly out of control.
Does this suggest that the protagonists of all hb crime
fiction are people who are injured by life and circumstances,
but retain something human and dignified in themselves,
including a thirst for justice - a justice which the law
isn't providing and which they have to step beyond the law to
look for? You see, I could live with that. These are valuable
and stoical characters. A lot of interesting fiction fits
this, from oral epic and classical tragedies onwards. (And as
someone on one of my other groups has just written, "I've
always prefered Batman to Superman.")
But one thing (among many, but I've only had one cup of
coffee so far this morning) is that, unless you accept,
without any kind of thought, the crude stereotype of women as
incapable of anything except being tearful victims waiting
for some strong man to rescue them from the vile whatnot (and
I have to say right away that I've never found infantilism
very interesting), this certainly does NOT exclude women from
the protagonist centre of hardboilery. Or black detectives.
(Yes, I like Walter Mosley very much.) Or amateurs. Or
anybody showing courage in the face of great odds.
When I was a kid, I used to read Dick Tracy comics. When I
got into my teens and started reading Hemingway, I found out
what was wrong with them. And stopped.
Marianne
-- # To unsubscribe, say "unsubscribe rara-avis" to majordomo@icomm.ca. # The web pages for the list are at http://www.miskatonic.org/rara-avis/ .
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : 28 May 2000 EDT