Mark wrote:
>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.
I think I like the way this discussion is going. There's
seems to be a begrudging admission that times change, and
that maybe the definition of something as hard to pin down as
the term "hard-boiled" changes with it. Certainly, if we're
to say that Chandler and Hammett are the be-all and end-all
of what hard-boiled is, then we're not talking about a living
genre, but a dusty museum piece, relegated to mothballs, with
very strict rules that would exclude almost every other
living author ever mentioned on this list. That's fine, if
you like mothballs.
But I think hard-boiled should be a tradition that continues,
acknowledging the past, but also evolving on its way, not
some precious set of rules locked in a display case that
everyone's afraid to touch. I see more hope for the genre
from people who twist and tweak the form, be it Ellroy,
Pellecanos, Grafton, Mosley, Parker, Lansdale, Paretsky,
Hansen, Burke, Block, or assorted Collinses, than those who
slavishly try to imitate, and bring nothing new to the table.
And that doesn't even mean I like all of the mentioned
writers, or that I don't enjoy a good rip-off of THE MALTESE
FALCON or THE LONG GOODBYE. But the authors who do colour
outside the lines are the ones who ultimately offer us the
best hope for the genre in the long-run. He's who's not busy
being born is busy dying, and all that.
Of course, if you assume nobody will ever write better than
Chandler or Hammett, well, there's always the museum. But
even Chandler found this idea preposterous. As he said, in
the intro to THE SIMPLE ART OF MURDER (1950), "There are no
'classics' of crime and detection (we could probably put in
hard-boiled there, for our purposes). Not one. Within its
frame of reference, which is the only way it should be
judged, a classic is a piece of writing which exhausts the
possibilities of its form... No story or novel of mystery has
done that. Few have come close. Which is why otherwise
reasonable people continue to assault the citadel."
Fifty years later, the citadel is still under siege. I think
that alone says something about the strength of the
genre.
Oh, and darling, you were right: the correct phrase is "once
more into the breach", not "breech". I regret the error, and
any pain it may have caused you.
--
Kevin Burton Smith The Thrilling Detective Web Site http://www.colba.net/~kvnsmith/thrillingdetective/
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