Mark Sullivan wrote:
> George said: "arguably the most original American
icon there is, the
> hard-boiled private eye."
>
> This may be the wrong place for this statement, but
what about the
> cowboy?
South America has a similar icon in the gaucho, which IIRC
developed (in real life) contemporaneously with the American
cowboy.
The hard-boiled dick, on the other hand, is sui
generis.
I remember reading an essay written by Alberto Edwards, the
author of the "Roman Calvo" stories (Calvo was a Sherlock
Holmes homage whose adventures were set in Santiago, Chile,
and appeared from 1912-1920). Edwards' argument (it was
written in the 1930s) was basically that the private eye
would look ridiculous in Santiago, or Buenos Aires, or Rio,
that no reader could take it seriously because everyone
-knew- that the private eye belonged in NYC or in LA. Edwards
wrote this when South American publishing houses had for
decades been cranking off gaucho stories in dime novels that
read for all the world like cowboy stories.
jess
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