Anthony
>That's okay, 'cause when I said ... "The easily
offended should stick with
>cozies anyway ... no use offending their delicate
sensibilities with
>reality." I didn't mean that cozies weren't real or
realistic, just that
>they do not have the same graphic realism that HB
has.
OK, but most of the coszies we're talking about I suspect are
from the 1920s-ish era. What has happened to the cozies? Ruth
Rendell, P.D. James, Colin Dexter, none of whom are always
polite, and call a whore a whore.
>The UK has a significantly smaller population than
even CONUS America ...
Yeah, I cry foul: compare us with New England please :)
>... well, in quantity we appear to be the same ...
but quality? ;) Crime
>doesn't happen so irregularly in the US that the
novelty of it makes it
>appear in our media ... blood sells is what makes
crime the primary news
>that we get. But that doesn't change the fact that
the crime occurred and it
>may have occurred to someone you don't know, it may
have occurred to you, or
>someone you work with. There was a survey that
reported an alarmingly number
>of people will either be a victim of a crime or that
some one close to them
>will be a victim of crime.
Oh, sure, but if we're comparing experiences, I've been shot
at, burgled
(twice, in an English village), my eighty year-old
grandmother had a Rottweiler set on her in the street - but
then she can be a bit threatening
- my brother very narrowly missed being blown up by the IRA
in Manchester. And I'm not unique either.
Still, I don't think my experience is particularly
hard-boiled, and I still don't think the world Marlowe lives
in is particularly like mine, though his attitude to it (that
the world is a corrupt place with only a few good people in
it) is increasingly common, and is played on by the media. My
limited experience of the US, and the experience of those
Brits I know who've also been brave enough to go there is
that despite the hype you just don't get murdered as a matter
of course. Is there something to be said I wonder for the
notion that the US uses its hard-boiled image in the same way
as the UK plays on its Kings and Queens heritage
nonsense?
Cheers Chris
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