RARA-AVIS: colloquial and hardboiled

From: Michael Robison ( zspider@gte.net)
Date: 23 Apr 2002


MrT agrees:
> I have to disagree with Jim Doherty about elegance and
> hardboiledness. Dudley Smith, one of the most hardboiled
> characters in crime fiction, expresses himself in a mild,
> fatherly brogue. His actions, though...

**********************************************

i'd been thinking about that myself. uh, not dudley actually, but the judge in mccarthy's _blood meridian_. the judge was more eloquent than colloquial, so if that's a requirement, then he didn't make the hardboiled grade. maybe he's just a noir sorta guy.

i don't know. i did not come here with any preconceived idea of what hardboiled means, so i've pretty much relied on group concensus for a definition.

applying a little (very little) thought to it makes me wonder about the
"colloquial "requirement. that means a character cannot be deemed hardboiled, solely by his actions. so a mute character could not be hardboiled, could he? ;-)

miker

--
# 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/ .



This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : 23 Apr 2002 EDT