Jim D wrote:
"Mild and fatherly, yes, but never with an upper-crust
elegance. Smith isn't a lace-curtain Irishman, he's a shanty
mick and proud of it. His speech is the speech of a
colloquial Irish immigrant, not an upper-class pedant. He has
the common, colloquial touch that Gutman not only lacks, but
disdains."
It seems to me that you are now expanding your colloquial
bounds to fit your gut reactions of who is and who is not
hardboiled. How is Dudley's exacting speech informal? It may
not be elegant, but colloquial? (And an argument could be
made that there is elegance in colloquial speech.)
By this definition, James Bond is not hardboiled because he
speaks well. And what about Hannibal Lecter? He's downright
eloquent in his speech.
There also seems to be a class bias here. Upper class cannot
be hardboiled?
What about Jason Starr's upwardly mobile characters? They
seem pretty damned hardboiled to me in the way they pursue
their goals; does their speaking well rule them out? I
haven't read McCoy's Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye yet, but isn't the
main character a well-educated, son of privilege? I'm
guessing he speaks well, too.
Mark
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