Juri wrote:
"Does that make any sense? What I meant to say was that the
genre leads to works, but the works equally lead to the
genre. (This begins to sound like the eternal hen-egg
question. Which one comes first? The works, perhaps, but one
might say that even the groundstone work in a genre
(say Tolkien's "Lord of the Rings") don't come out of
nowhere. They have their own predecessors.)"
Makes sense to me. This is what I was trying to get at when I
said it matters where a work lies in the evolution of a
genre. John Cawelti's work is very interesting in this area,
particularly his article
"Chinatown and Generic Transformations in Recent Films." He
deals mostly with film, both hardboiled and westerns (he has
previously written extensively about the former's roots in
the latter), but also touches on the written roots. For the
record, he sees the four modes of transformation as: humorous
burlesque, evocation of nostalgia, mythologization of generic
myth and the affirmation of the myth as myth. Of course,
there is plenty of overlap between the categories. It's not
hard to think of examples of each in recent PI novels. Hell,
Joe Gores's DKA series alone is a testament to the genre's
continued elaticity, including examples of all of them, from
the zero-degree procedurals of the early books to the
hilarity of 32 Cadillacs.
This reminds me of the other thing I wanted to get into, how
the PI novel of the past few decades has been transformed.
Just look at Chinatown -- SPOILER ALERT -- as originally
written, it ended with Evelyn Mulray killing her father Noah
Cross and stoically standing trial while JJ Gittes spirited
her daughter away to Mexico. Polanski changed the script
against scriptwriter Robert Towne's wishes (which makes it
ironic that it was the shooting script, not the original that
was published under Towne's name). I'm guessing just about
everyone here knows how the finished film ends -- Evelyn is
shot and Noah Cross gets his daughter/granddaughter and
there's nothing Gittes can do about it --
"It's Chinatown, Jake." Towne's script was very traditional,
evoking the genre at the time the story is set. Polanski's
take fit with the time the film was released.
That sense of futility permeates the post-Vietnam PI novel. I
mentioned in an earlier post that David Brandstetter's
investigations never save his insurance company employer any
money, sometimes actually cost them money when a regular
payoff becomes double indemnity. As often as not, the PI does
no good -- in Michael Z. Lewin's The Way We Die Now, PI
Albert Samson uncovers a whole murder for hire plot, but it
doesn't help get his client out of jail. Even the usually
infallible Spenser can do no good in Mortal Stakes. In both
Parker's God Save the Child and Arthur Lyons's All God's
Children the PI comes to realize a kidnapped kid is better
off with his captors than his parents. I just reread Jonathan
Valin's Second Chances -- SPOILER ALERT -- not only did he
not help his client, he ended up revealing she was
guilty.
And following in Ross Macdonald's wake, many are the cases
that end up exposing generations of buried secrets, causing
more trouble. I'm with Kevin in praising Stephen Greenleaf's
Marshall Tanner series. He and a number of the recent
generation of PI writers (particularly Lewin, Valin) did
start out owing as much to Macdonald as he, in turn, owed
Chandler, but they all found their own ways, making their PIs
distinctive individuals, not imitations of anyone.
Mark
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