Mark B wrote:
"The books George Pelecanos is writing are not set in his
present. They are hard boiled, but they are also historical
novels."
For the record, this only applies to the DC Quartet (I know
you're working your way through those now, Mark). The rest of
his novels, the four before that (although there's a long
flashback sequence in Nick's Trip) and the, soon to be, two
since are all contemporaneous novels.
However, this raises an interesting question -- is there a
difference between an older hardboiled novel set in its own
time and a later one set in the same time?
I'd say, yes, since it is a conscious choice for the one
writer to write about the past, while it is probably as much
default as anything else that another writer sets his/her
work in her/his own time. For instance, Ellroy seems to set
his books in the past in order to exploit certain social
attitudes and behaviors that would not be as easily accepted
in a contemporary book. And in doing this, he probably
forefronts a more specific and intentional interpretation of
a society than a writer of that time who may take the era's
whole zeitgeist for granted. If nothing else, Ellroy is
saying this older time offered things that today's society
does not. I'm not going to get into whether or not he
endorses those differences.
Mark
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