Of the many, many What Is Hardboiled? discussions that have
taken place in the last year, this latest is the most lucid.
However, one of the participants made the assumption that
anyone subscribing to rara-avis would have to like hardboiled
fiction. That's the problem I have with the general
discussion -- a key word has been ignored: "good." We all
like good hardboiled fiction. When it comes to faux
hardboiled or pretentious hardboiled or humorless hardboiled,
I'd rather read Agatha Christie. So the questioning of Sue
Grafton's hardboiled qualifications seem beside the point to
me. She sure as hell isn't writing cozies. Her detective is
tougher, has more attitude and is more of a loner than Nick
Charles. What she and a lot of contemporary crime writers
seem to be doing is trying to break away from formula. In one
novel she'll have Milhone engaging in a close-quarter
shootout that she sustains for a very long time, nearly a
quarter of the book. In another, the detective travels across
the country on the trail of embezzlers. In yet another, she
becomes enmeshed in family history. Unlike Chandler and
Hammett, who wrote only a handful of novels, Grafton and
Parker and the rest pop out a book a year (more than one in
Parker's case). Some are more hardboiled than others but,
more important I think, is the point that some are
better-written than others.
On that note, I'd like to recommend a novel that's just been
published,
"Cold Steel Rain" by Kenneth Abel. In the tradition of Robert
Penn Warren's
"All The King's Men," which should qualify as hardboiled,
it's about a gofer for a Louisiana political boss who gets
fed up with the crime and corruption. Beautifully written.
Tough and unsparing. Supposedly the first in a proposed
series. I'm not familiar with the author's other two
books,
"Bait" and "The Blue Wall," but I get the feeling "Abel" may
be a pen name for a mainstream novelist who has decided to do
a James Lee Burke conversion.
Dick Lochte
-- # To unsubscribe from the regular list, say "unsubscribe rara-avis" to # majordomo@icomm.ca. This will not work for the digest version. # The web pages for the list are at http://www.miskatonic.org/rara-avis/ .
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : 07 Sep 2000 EDT