>Also the mob was
>pretty much tied up in the industry from the
beginning, wasn't it?
Um, was it? The film industry preceded Prohibition, so the
Mob, if it existed at all, wouldn't have been this big
powerful entity at the time. There were probably mobs then,
but not The Mob. It took an act of law to give us that.
I wrote:
>"Interestingly, radio eyes didn't seem as
LA-obsessed. But then
>television came along and more than made up for
it."
And Mark wrote:
>Of course, the radio industry's home was New York,
not LA. Which raises
>the question: were radio PIs New
York-obsessed?
Yeah. But mostly they were scattered all over. The writers
had free reign to set their stories anywhere, unbound by the
shackles of visuals and the financial limitations of location
shootings. And so they did.
I'm not discounting Kerry's whole mythic go west young man,
end of the road theory, but I've read far too many bad
hardboiled novels
(particularly P.I. novels) written by authors who wouldn't
know a myth if it pissed on their leg. Their choice of L.A.
as a setting seems to be totally arbitrary, based more on
imitating Chandler than having anything to say.
Not that L.A, isn't a fine place to set a hard-boiled novel
(if the writer has something to say about it) but I'm glad we
seem to have broken that New York/L.A. yoke. The revived
regionalism in the mystery genre (Spenser in Boston, Walker
in Detroit, Hap and Leonard in Texas, Paretsky in Chicago,
George's guys in Washington, D.C., Kerry's own John Swan in
Hamilton, etc., etc.) is one of the things I really
dig.
These guys make these places come alive, something a lot of
pallid L.A.-set novels never do.
-- Kevin -- # 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/ .
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