Ray,
Re your comment below:
> Perhaps rather than colloquialism as a
defining
> characteristic, it's just
> that every so often you have to be a
smartass.
> Maybe it's the sarcastic, cutting response
to
> threats, violence, etc., that
> is the defining verbal characteristic of
> hard-boiled.
> Add in some street-wise toughness, and,
voila,
> hard-boiled :-).
You're close, but not every hard-boiled character is a
smart-ass who wields a sharp wit with rapier-like acumen. On
the other hand, Sherlock Holmes could be bitingly sarcastic
and smart-ass (witness his face-to-face with Prof. Moriarty
in "The Final Problem").
Street wisdom, in the context of hard-boiled crime fiction,
is exhibited partly by action ("tough") and partly by
language ("colloquial"). Occasionally, perhaps even usually,
the colloquial language is combined with a sardonic wit, but
that's not always the case.
> I think cozies are more designed to be humorous.
If
> you read some of
> Charlotte Macleod's early books, the killer
usually
> turns out to be
> some respectible character who has a long-history
of
> murder, fraud, and
> mayhem in their past. This is not
reassuring.
Not all cozies are humorous. Not all hard-boiled stories are
urgently dramatic. What distiguishes hard-boiled is a tough
direct way of acting, "tough" to sum it up in a single word,
and a tough, vernacular use of language, which might be
called "colloquial."
JIM DOHERTY
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