The recent discussion of Hammett's relationship to the
hardboiled genre interests me. Depending upon your position,
he was either breaking all of the old rules of mysteries or
creating a whole new set. To paraphrase Chandler, Hammett
gave murder back to the kind of people who commit it for a
reason . . .
And whatever those rules ultimately are (must wear a fedora,
feature a dangerous woman, a gunfight, a dead body, etc), if
they become ironclad, do what the cops in our books always
say, Freeze!, they straitjacket, then strangle a genre. Let
me continue with the music metaphors we've been using of
late: when jazz or blues or rock becomes exclusionary, as
intent upon keeping people out as on allowing people in, it
becomes an archival pursuit, more interested in replicating
the style than in promoting the spirit. To put it simply, it
becomes more about re-creating than creating.
This is one of the reasons I'm skeptical of most period
hardboiled. It looks back nostalgically to an earlier era the
author believes was more suited to the genre. And in my mind,
nostalgia is based upon a sentimentality that tends to
undercut hardboiled. It adds distance to a genre built on
immediacy.
Our world is different, so it seems obvious that whatever
hardboiled is, it would have to change in order to remain
hardboiled in changed times. I'm a lot more interested in
authors who explore what it means to be hardboiled in their
own time (whether the '20s, '30s, . . . '90s or
'00s) than I am in those who struggle to impose an earlier
model upon a later era.
To paraphrase Woody Allen, A shark's got to move forward or
die, do we want a dead shark?
Mark
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