Bill D wrote:
"I was thinking that next month we could try talking about
work and the work ethic in hardboiled fiction. . . . If
anyone has any good titles on this theme, let me know, and
I'll list them."
Speaking of titles, per se, the word "business" seems to be
in a number
-- Trouble Is My Business by Chandler, My Business Is Murder
by Henry Kane, Murder Is My Business by Brett Halliday and
later the killer-for-hire anthology by Spillane and Max
Collins. It's a clear signifier that you're not dealing with
an amateur detective here, which is one of the markers of
hardboiled, that the people have a professional reason to
deal with crime, as a detective, private or police, a
reporter, crime photographer, criminal or killer.
In addition, in many recent noirs I have read the trouble
starts, and often plays out, in a work setting -- Jason
Starr's Cold Caller (are his others?), Vicki Hendrick's Miami
Purity, Terrill Lankford's Shooters, Scott Phillips' Ice
Harvest, etc.
"In May I thought we could tackle Dorothy B. Hughes: is she
or isn't she?"
Cool, I recently bought a volume which collected her Ride a
Pink Horse, In a Lonely Place and The Davidian Report.
"After that I think the collections of letters from Hammett
and Chandler will be out in North America and the
Commonwealth, so we can look at them."
I renew an earlier suggestion: How about after all of those,
Howard Browne?
Mark
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