Re: Hardboiled Holmes (was Re: RARA-AVIS: Digest V3 #867)

From: Chris Routledge ( srcrout@ntlworld.com)
Date: 07 Sep 2001


At 01:44 PM 9/7/01 -0400, Jess wrote:
>One of the essential differences is that the mean streets Holmes
>walked were, in the Holmes universe, essentially correctable, and
>not irredeemably corrupted.

I've always thought that villains in the Holmes milieu (maybe Victorian fiction generally) had made a choice to be bad: Moriarty is after all just Holmes with an evil cackle. But in H-B fiction people are just mean, whether because they are born bad, or because something happened to them in the past that they can't back out of. On the other hand, as I've mentioned here before, Doyle does mention Pinkerton detectives now and then. The American scenes in THe Valley of Fear could come straight out of the hard-boiled canon.

Chris

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