Juri wrote:
"Yes. That's just what I was trying to say. They tried to
break them. Whether they succeeded, I don't know (Thompson,
to my mind, didn't always). And breaking those conventions
seems to me to be more interesting than trying to break the
conventions of the P.I. genre. Why that is, I don't
know."
This sounds more like a matter of taste than a critical
stance, just as I stated my taste runs more towards PI
novels. And as Tad Allagash said in Jay McInnerny's Bright
Lights Big City, "Taste, after all, is a matter of
taste."
"Maybe I just don't need reassurement and comfort. I like to
be shattered."
I think you may have taken my use of the word "reassuring"
wrong. I don't require or even want a story that is
reassuring. It is the genre itself I find reassuring. And
while you may favor shattering stories, as do I, that's a
matter of plot and/or content, not of form -- in other words,
I find the form conventional, but hope to discover innovation
in the content As I've stated, I believe the authors you
champion rely just as heavily upon tired and true forms. How
could we say Blood Simple or Body Heat are Cain-like if he
did not have certain patterns and themes running through his
ouevre? Goodis was the most blatant in telling the same story
over and over again, but the others you hail did it,
too.
Finally, this break you talk about happened quite some time
ago. Have others followed in their wake and continued the
revolution? If so, who? This last is not meant to be
argumentative. I really want to know. I'd like to add some
good recent authors in this vein to the few I already know
and like, such as Russell James, Ken Bruen, Nicholas Blincoe,
Jeremy Hawes and Scott Phillips, along with the others I
mentioned in my last post.
Mark
-- # 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 : 01 Mar 2001 EST