Sorry to butt in.
--- M Blumenthal <
blumenidiot@21stcentury.net> wrote:
> Jim,
> I'm making some progress. Now you concede
hard
> boiled is not solely
> language. You hadn't done that earlier. I'll
now
> have to get you to concede
> that being born wealthy and/or having a
good
> education does not preclude a
> character from being hard boiled. There is
free
> will . People can have
> their situation change either by their own
volition
> or because
> circumstances change. A few examples of
characters
> in the best 111 who
> ostensibly do not meet all your criteria are
Richard
> Bone, (Cutter and
> certainly Mo also would fall under this
category,
> but they didn't make the
> cut.) Bruce Wayne, James Figueroas, Milo
> Milodragovitch and C W Sugrue
> (Crumley, who I always considered a writer of
hard
> boiled fiction, can't
> restrain himself from having his two
protagonists
> sometimes write some very
> lyrical passages)
I don't think being rich or educated precludes a character
from being hardboiled, but I do think a hardboiled novel
needs at least a sense of the class strata -- from high to
low. Ross Macdonald seems the obvious example.
Haven't encountered all of the characters you mention above.
Crumley's books are determinedly fixated on lowlifes of
various stripes. Bruce Wayne is rich, but that's not the
interest of the stories so much as a necessary plot device.
He fights crime out in the trenches, as it were. (Check out
Frank Miller's BATMAN: YEAR ONE.)
> An assassin like James Bond you say is not
hard
> boiled.
I like the Bond books very much, but they really seem to me
to have more in common with a kind of British Adventure
Fiction that streches all the way back to Talbot Mundy, H.
Rider Haggard, etc., as well as hero pulps in general. Can't
remember if it's in the movie, but in the book DOCTOR NO Bond
ends up fighting a big octopus, for instance, which sounds
like something right out of Doc Savage. That link someone
provided was very informative on this point.
A much better example along the Bond lines is Adam
Hall's/Elleston Trevor's Quiller series. I simply can't say
enough about these books -- IMHO they supersede the Matt Helm
novels, and indeed are as good as "adventurous" spy fiction
gets.
doug
===== Doug Bassett
dj_bassett@yahoo.com
__________________________________________________ Do You
Yahoo!? Yahoo! Games - play chess, backgammon, pool and more
http://games.yahoo.com/
-- # 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 : 24 Apr 2002 EDT